ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the expression for fusion operations. It discusses the fusion update and communication aspects of decentralized data fusion (DDF) and explains the operation of DDF on tree topology networks. The chapter describes the trajectory state formulation for dynamics and uses this to operate decentralized networks for dynamic systems, including handling delayed, sequent and burst communications issues. It considers DDF with a focus on the observation update and the decentralized communication, particularly in tree topology networks. The chapter reviews the channel cache algorithm for handling the local node information and decentralized communications operations. It also describes an alternative approach known as delayed state or trajectory state approach, which is designed to address the aforementioned issues. The key point relating to tree networks is that the DDF problem can be reduced down to a problem of finding a global sum of information terms, which is performed in an efficient local manner on a tree network.
