Information Fusion 42 (2018) 119–126

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Information Fusion
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/inffus

Collaborative fusion estimation over wireless sensor networks for MARK

monitoring CO2 concentration in a greenhouse☆
⁎,a,b
Xingzhen Baia, Zidong Wang , Lei Zoua, Fuad E. Alsaadic
a
College of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao 266590, China
b
Department of Computer Science, Brunel University London, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UB8 3PH, United Kingdom
c
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: This paper investigates the data fusion problem over wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for monitoring the carbon
Data fusion dioxide (CO2) concentration in a greenhouse. CO2 concentration is an important environmental parameter in the
Consensus–Kalman filter greenhouse, and adequate regulation of CO2 concentration is certainly beneficial to the improvement of the crop
CO2 concentration growth efficiency in the greenhouse. Since the measurement of CO2 concentration is unavoidably subject to
Greenhouse monitor
environmental interferences (e.g. noises), it is vitally important to estimate the true CO2 concentration through
available sensor measurements over a WSN with given topology. In this paper, based on the Consensus–Kalman
filter, the distributed estimation scheme is presented to improve the state estimation accuracy. After the dis-
tributed consensus estimation, the head node can conduct the fusion estimation on the data from the available
sensor nodes. The packet loss phenomenon brought by unreliable communication links is reflected by the
proportion of the faulty sensors. To further alleviate the effects from the packet losses, we propose a modified
estimation scheme for the head node that combines the estimates from sensor node at both the previous and
current time points, thereby enhancing the accuracy of data fusion. Simulation analysis is carried out on the
collected information of CO2 concentration in the greenhouse in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the
proposed scheme.

1. Introduction
The greenhouse system is regarded as the innovation of modern
agriculture that provides crops with the favorable environmental con-
ditions [11]. A greenhouse is a closed environment that can be actively
controlled to improve the crop yields [17]. Like temperature and hu-
midity, the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration is another important
environment parameter in the greenhouse. During the photosynthesis
process, CO2 and sunlight are used to generate carbohydrates required
by crop growth [15]. A typical change curve of CO2 concentration
gathered in the greenhouse is shown in Fig. 1, from which we can
observe that the change of CO2 concentration is relatively large in one-
day time. During the time period from 10:30 to 16:00, the CO2 con-
sumption is quite large and this is obviously due to the crop photo-
synthesis. Reasonable regulation of CO2 concentration could supply
sufficient CO2 for the crop photosynthesis, enhance the efficiency of
crop growth [14] and further improve the crop quality in the green-
house [21].
There has been a rich literature focusing on the monitor and control
problem on CO2 concentration in the greenhouse [5,15,23,24]. In [5],
the change rule of CO2 concentration in the greenhouse has been in-
vestigated and two conclusions have been drawn: 1) there are obvious
seasonal and diurnal variations of CO2 concentration in the greenhouse,
and 2) adjusting the CO2 concentration reasonably could increase
production and also improve the quality of crops. In [23], the variations
of CO2 concentration have been studied for the overwintering tomato
cultivation in the solar greenhouse with sand land. It has been sug-
gested that CO2 enrichment would be needed during the cultivation
process in the greenhouse. In [24], two quantitative models have been
established by using the back-propagation (BP) neural networks and the
radial basis function (RBF) neural networks, respectively, where the
crop photosynthetic rate and CO2 concentration in the greenhouse have
been analyzed for reliable action on the CO2 enrichment. In [15], a
prediction model has been built for the single leaf photosynthetic rate
on the BP neural network, which could be used to the quantitative
management of CO2 concentration for the tomato cultivation in the

☆
This work was supported in part by the Research Fund for the Taishan Scholar Project of Shandong Province of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants
61329301, 61703245, the Royal Society of the U.K., and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany.
⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: Zidong.Wang@brunel.ac.uk (Z. Wang).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2017.11.001
Received 12 September 2017; Received in revised form 29 October 2017; Accepted 1 November 2017
1566-2535/ © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
X. Bai et al.
Fig. 1. Change curve of CO2 concentration in the greenhouse.
greenhouse environment. It can be seen from the aforementioned lit-
erature that the estimation/control of CO2 concentration is a practically
significant topic of research for efficient growth of crops in the green-
house. Unfortunately, the greenhouse system is a complex time-varying
system and it is difficult to accurately predict the CO2 concentration for
the control over the CO2 enrichment in the greenhouse. As such, the
real-time monitoring of CO2 concentration could help the control of
CO2 concentration changes in the greenhouse. The recently popular
wireless sensor network (WSN) [13] is very propitious to the distributed
environment monitoring due to its great advantages including easy
deployment, self-organization, less demand for cables and network
extendibility, etc. [17]. With a deployed WSN, the CO2 concentration
could be monitored efficiently in the greenhouse, and this would help
facilitate the reliable control over CO2 content with hope to create the
best conditions for the crop growth.
Despite the capability of WSNs in acquiring the CO2 concentration
information in the greenhouse, there is a gap between the information
gathered by distributed sensor nodes and the understanding of the CO2
concentration state in the greenhouse. Such a gap is mainly due to the
unavoidable internal and external disturbances as well as communica-
tion constraints of the WSNs. For example, the sensor measurements
could be subject to various types of noises, packet dropouts and com-
munication delays that result typically from random fluctuations of the
network conditions and inherent limits of the network bandwidth.
Therefore, a vitally important issue is to estimate the true CO2 con-
centration in the greenhouse from imperfect sensor measurements for
the benefits of CO2 enrichment for the crop growth. It has been dis-
covered in [27] that the data fusion estimation of WSNs in the green-
house monitor system can enhance the sensory ability of the green-
house environmental state. In [22], the estimation process has
combined the observed data with the spatial or temporal correlation
according to certain rules to get the accurate description of the mon-
itored object. In [27], a weighted fusion algorithm with optimized
grouping has been proposed which could improve the optimal estima-
tion of the greenhouse environmental state. In [22], the Kalman filter
algorithm has been introduced into the greenhouse environment
monitor system by using an improved distribution map method. It
should be pointed out that the fusion algorithm can improve the
monitor accuracy only under the condition of stable operation of the
greenhouse system. In [6], the measured values of sensor nodes in each
group have been assumed to be tested for the consistency to exclude
outliers, which may throw away the data caused by the dynamic fluc-
tuations of the system and reduce the information integrity for the
accurate estimation.
As is well known, the greenhouse system is a complicated system
with chemical, biological and physical reactions [19], and it is rather
challenging to grasp the changing law of the dynamic process. In order
to obtain a satisfactory state estimation for CO2 concentration over
WSNs with network-induced phenomena, the data fusion scheme
should take into account both the dynamic changes of the CO2 con-
centration in the greenhouse and the inherent characteristics of WSNs.
It is, therefore, the focus of this paper to investigate the fusion
120
Information Fusion 42 (2018) 119–126
estimation problem over WSNs for monitoring the CO2 concentration in
a greenhouse where the possible packet dropouts with the commu-
nication links and the combined utilization of current and past esti-
mates are taken into account. Motivated by the discussions made so far,
in this paper, the data fusion scheme for estimating CO2 concentration
in the greenhouse over WSNs is investigated. Since the distribution of
CO2 concentration has characteristics of regional consistency in the
modern greenhouse with large scale size, the cluster-based WSNs is
adopted for efficient monitoring of CO2 concentration in the green-
house. Considering the facts that the measurement of CO2 concentra-
tion is easily subject to environmental interferences, the distributed
estimation scheme via Consensus–Kalman filtering approach is pro-
posed to improve the estimation accuracy of CO2 concentration where
the sensory data are transmitted to the head node by the distributed
data dissemination in WSNs. The head node of the cluster carries out
the weighted data fusion of the data from the available nodes in the
same cluster within hierarchical networks.
The main contributions of this paper are summarized as follows: 1)
the distributed Consensus–Kalman filter algorithm is proposed to esti-
mate the CO2 concentration in order to improve the estimation accu-
racy; 2) the distributed transmission of sensory data is allowed to
conduct on the dynamic route in WSNs so as to reduce the commu-
nication conflict and increase the transmission efficiency from sensor
nodes to the head node; 3) the proportion of the faulty sensors is used to
reflect the packet loss phenomenon resulting from the unreliable
communication links; and 4) a modified estimation strategy is put
forward that combines the estimates from sensor node at both the
previous and current time points, thereby improving the accuracy of
data fusion.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 in-
troduces the network model and system model of WSNs for CO2 con-
centration monitoring in the greenhouse. The problem formulation is
presented for the distributed estimation and transmission in WSNs. In
Section 3, the detailed schemes for distributed data estimation and
transmission are proposed. In addition, the reliable data fusion scheme
at the cluster head node is presented. The simulation and performance
evaluations are presented in Section 4 to demonstrate the effectiveness
of our proposed scheme. Finally, we conclude the paper and point out
possible future research topics in Section 5.
2. System description and problem formulation
2.1. Network model
WSNs are composed of wireless sensors of small size and low cost,
which have potentials for ubiquitous monitoring of the smart green-
house. In Fig. 2(a), the WSN with single layer network structure is
presented for the greenhouse monitoring, which is suitable for the
small-scale greenhouse. Sensor nodes can transmit the collected in-
formation to the sink node for the reliable control over the CO2 con-
centration in the greenhouse. If the greenhouse space is relatively large,
the distribution of CO2 concentration is often not uniform. In order to
improve the accuracy of data fusion and perform the reliable dis-
tributed control, the cluster-based WSN is a good choice. As shown in
Fig. 2(b), sensor nodes scattered in the field are divided into several
clusters. Each cluster has a head node with superior power, computa-
tional and communication capabilities as compared to other sensor
nodes. The cluster-based topology of the WSNs scales effectively in
accordance with the regional variations of CO2 concentration in the
greenhouse with a larger space. Sensor nodes have limited commu-
nication capability, and they are responsible for collecting and sending
data to the corresponding head node by multihop transmissions. The
head nodes fuse the data and send them to the sink node of WSNs for
further processing. Head nodes can be integrated with actuators for the
distributed control over the state change in the greenhouse.
The topology of the network is modelled as a fixed directed graph
X. Bai et al.
(a) Single layer WSN
(b) Cluster-based WSN
Fig. 2. Structure of WSNs for CO2 concentration monitor in the greenhouse.
G = (V , ɛ) with the set of nodes V = {1, 2, ⋯N } and the set of edges
ε⊆V × V, where V is the vertex set which consists of sensor nodes and
head nodes, and ε is the set of communication links over which local
information is exchanged between neighbor nodes. It is assumed that
there are n sensor nodes divided into m clusters in the field, and then
N = n + m . In addition, Ci(i = 1, 2, ⋯m) denotes node cluster which
consists of p member nodes and a head node. As for the cluster-based
WSN for the CO2 concentration monitoring in the greenhouse, only the
sensor nodes belonging to the same cluster can communicate with each
other, though the distance between sensor nodes located in different
clusters meets the communication requirements. The set
ℵi = {j ∈ Cξ : (j, i) ∈ ɛ, j ≠ i} denotes the set of neighbor nodes of sensor
node i in cluster ξ. Similarly, the head node can only communicate with
the sensor nodes in the same cluster.
2.2. System model
In this paper, the dynamic discrete-time system describing the state
of CO2 concentration in the greenhouse is as follows:
x (k + 1) = Ax (k ) + ω (k ), k = 1, 2, …
where x (k ) ∈ nx and ω (k ) ∈ nw are the state of CO2 concentration
and the zero-mean white process noise with variance Q at time k, re-
spectively. The measurement output equation of sensor node i is:
Information Fusion 42 (2018) 119–126
Fig. 3. Distributed transmission of nodes in the cluster of WSNs.
yi (k ) = Hi x i (k ) + Di vi (k ), i ∈ {1, 2, …, n} (2)
where yi(k) denotes the output measured by sensor node i, and vi(k) is
zero-mean white measurement noise with variances Ri. The above
matrices A, Hi and Di are constant matrices with appropriate dimen-
sions. In addition, it is assumed that the measurement noises of sensor
nodes in the same cluster are not correlated.
2.3. Distributed data estimation and transmission in WSNs
As is well known, the reliable communication between sensor nodes
in WSNs can only be possible within a short range, and the global in-
formation is not directly available at each sensor [29]. Sensor nodes can
exchange data with their neighbor nodes, and the distributed local data
delivery would fulfill the information transmission from the source to
the destination step by step. In Fig. 3, senor nodes transmit their sen-
sory data to the head node through the distributed transmission in
WSNs. In WSNs, full coverage of sensor nodes is required to ensure the
integrity of monitored information collected by the sensor nodes [1].
However, there might be a large number of redundant information,
which would lead to channel conflict and reduce the transmission ef-
ficiency in WSNs. On the other hand, the sensory information is often
noisy and intermittent because of the measurement noises, packet loss
and delay caused by limited bandwidth of the networks. Therefore, the
distributed data fusion of sensor nodes is necessary for the improve-
ment of estimation accuracy and transmission performance of WSNs
[3]. As mentioned previously, CO2 concentration in the greenhouse has
the feature of regional consistency, that is, the adjacent sensors tend to
have consistent observations. If the sensor nodes conduct the consensus
estimation, the estimation disagreement of neighbor sensor nodes
would decrease, which can improve the estimation accuracy of CO2
concentration. In Fig. 3, it can be observed that, under the current
network topology, node 4 can conduct the consensus filter estimation
with 3 neighbor nodes, i.e., node 1, node 5 and node 6. In addition, the
head node does not collect data by itself, but can receive and fuse the
data from its available neighbor sensor nodes. In Fig. 3, the head node
can get the data for estimation from node 1, node 7, node 8 and node 9.
Moreover, in WSNs, since the communication link is unstable, sensor
nodes might alter their transmission node dynamically with the change
(1) of network topology. In Fig. 3, both node 12 and node 14 are the
neighbor nodes of node 13, and the link between node 12 and node 13
is connected at the current moment. However, node 13 may connect
with node 14 at next moment because of the change of dynamic link in
WSNs.
121
X. Bai et al. Information Fusion 42 (2018) 119–126

Remark 1. The consensus filter estimation is in accordance with the Table 1

regional consistency characteristic of CO2 concentration in the Distributed information transmission and consensus estimation of sensor node.
greenhouse. The consensus estimation is mainly used to improve the
1: Initialization ϑi (k ) = [fi (k ), gi (k ), xi (k )] for sensor nodes i
data fusion accuracy of sensor nodes, and the estimation of the cluster
2: while new data for transmission do
needs to summarize the data from member sensor nodes in the same 3: for sensor nodes in adjacent area do
cluster. 4: Transmit ϑi(k) to its neighbor nodes
5: end for
6: for sensor receiving ϑi(k) from their neighbors do
3. Consensus estimation and data transmission of WSNs 7: Perform distributed Kalman–Consensus Filter estimation
8: Transmit ϑj (k + 1) to its neighbor nodes

In this section, we first present the Kalmanconsensus filter of sensor
nodes to estimate the state change of CO2 concentration in the green-
house. The distributed data transmission method is designed for the
data dissemination in WSNs. The weighted data fusion is carried out at
the head node on the relevance analysis of data receiving from member
nodes in the cluster. To alleviate the effects from possible packet losses
resulting from limited network bandwidth, a modified estimation
scheme is proposed for the head node that combines the estimates from
sensor node at both the previous and current time points, thereby en-
hancing the accuracy of data fusion.
3.1. Distributed Kalman-consensus filter
For sensor node i, let the measurements up to time k (i.e., the col-
lective data Yi (k ) = {yi (0), yi (1), ⋯, yi (k )} ) be given. The estimation and
prior estimation of the state x(k) are denoted as x î (k ) and x i (k ), re-
spectively, which can be expressed as follows:
x î (k ) = E {x (k ) Yi (k )}
x i (k ) = E {x (k ) Yi (k − 1)} (3)
Furthermore, let φi (k ) = x î (k ) − x (k ) and φi (k ) = x i (k ) − x (k ) be the
estimation errors. Then, the error covariance of estimation x î (k ) and
x i (k ) are as follows:
Mi (k ) = E {φi (k ) φi (k )T }
Pi (k ) = E {φi (k ) φi (k )T } (4)
Considering the WSN with the observation model (2) for the dy-
namic system (1), each sensor performs the following iterations process
of the Kalman–Consensus filter [3,18] with the adjacent nodes:
Mi (k )= (Pi−1 (k ) + Si (k ))−1
x î (k )= x i (k ) + Mi (k )(z i (k ) − Si (k ) x i (k ))
+ ∑ (x j (k ) − x i (k ))
j ∈ℵi
Pi (k + 1)= AMi (k ) AT + Q
x i (k + 1)= Ax î (k ) (5)
where z i = ∑j ∈ℵi HjT Rj−1yj ,Si = ∑j ∈ℵi HjT Rj−1Hj and ℵi = ℵi ∪ {i} . Let
fi (k ) = HjT Rj−1yj and gi (k ) = HjT Rj−1Hj . Note that, as defined in
Section 2, the set ℵi denotes the adjacent nodes participating in the
Kalman–Consensus filter of sensor i, which means neighbor nodes of
node i are one-hop distance from node i, and therefore the distributed
consensus filter can improve the perception capability of sensor nodes
for CO2 concentration monitoring. The distributed Kalman–Consensus
filter estimation is carried out along with the data dissemination pro-
cess in WSNs, which improves the consistency of the state estimation of
nodes in the same cluster.
3.2. Distributed data transmission and estimation
During the transmission process in WSNs, sensor node i exchanges
fi(k), gi(k) and x i (k ) with its neighbor nodes for the consensus estima-
tion by the vector ϑi(k). At the same time, sensor node i transmits its
estimation result to the corresponding parent nodes, which form a
temporary route to the head node. As can be seen from the description
in Table 1, through the distributed information transmission among
9: Transmit xi ̂ (k + 1) to the corresponding parent nodes.
10: end for
11: end while
sensor nodes, the cluster head can receive the data from sensor nodes.
After receiving estimation ϑi(k) from neighbor nodes, node i per-
forms the distributed consensus estimation as follows,
x î (k )= x i (k ) + Mi (k )(z i (k ) − Si (k ) x i (k ))
+ ∑ aij (k )(x j (k ) − x i (k ))
j ∈ℵi (6)
where the coefficient aij(k) reflects whether sensor node i connects with
sensor node j or not, which models the dynamic changes of commu-
nication links in WSNs. At time instant k, if sensor node i can receive
data from sensor j, aij (k ) = 1, otherwise aij (k ) = 0 .
Remark 2. For the distributed filter of WSNs [8,16,20], the data
available for the fusion is not only from its own measurement but also
from its adjacent nodes’ measurements [9]. However, the dynamic
topology makes the coupling relation between neighbor nodes more
complicated, which would affect the estimation accuracy of sensor
nodes.
3.3. Data fusion estimation at the cluster head
The cluster heads cannot collect data by themselves as they are only
responsible for summarizing and analyzing the data received from
available sensor nodes. With the connection of the head node with
sensor nodes at time k, the state of the head node can be expressed as a
convex combination of sensor nodes in the same cluster [30], i.e.,
x iĉ (k ) = ∑ γij xî (k ) ∀ i ∈ TH
j ∈ Ts (7)
where Ts and TH denote the sets of sensor nodes and head nodes in
WSNs, respectively. Sensor node j and head node i are connected at time
k. In addition, 0 ≤ γij ≤ 1 and ∑j ∈ Ts γij = 1. The weight coefficients γij
should be optimized according to the relevance of data from different
sensor nodes. The optimal weights of member sensor nodes can be
obtained by the relevance analysis on the support function, which de-
scribes the support degree between correlated variables [25]. For ex-
ample, Sup(a, b) denotes the support degree for a from b, indicating the
proximity between a and b [25]. Then, we have
Sup(x î (k ), x j ̂ (k )) = G (x î (k ), x î (k ), K , β ) = bij (8)
and the support matrix can be written as follows:
⎡ b11 b12 … b1τ ⎤
⎢b b … b2τ ⎥
Λ ≜ ⎢ 21 22 ,
⋮ ⋮ ⋮ ⋮⎥
⎢ ⎥
⎣ bτ 1 bτ 2 … bττ ⎦ (9)
where Λ is used to describe the degree of mutual support among sensor
nodes in the cluster at time k. Considering the packet loss in the
transmission process, we let the number of sensors participating the
fusion at the head node be τ where τ ≤ p. The relevance of sensor i and
other sensors is:

122
X. Bai et al. Information Fusion 42 (2018) 119–126

Fig. 4. Consensus filter estimation with different number of

neighbor nodes.

τ
monitoring of WSNs. Moreover, the regional estimation contributes to
ρi (k ) = ∑ bij /τ the integrating with the distributed control system such as the
j=1 (10)
implementation of wireless sensor and actuator networks [4].
and the weight coefficients γij can be rewritten into
ρj (k ) 4. Simulation and evaluation
γij = τ .
∑l = 1 ρl (k ) (11)
In this section, the collected data of CO2 concentration in the
Then, the estimate of the node cluster i is: greenhouse is used to evaluate the proposed data fusion scheme. The
τ CO2 concentration information is from time 0:00 to 24:00 gathered in
∑ j = 1 ρj (k ) x j ̂ (ti (k ) ti (k ))
x iĉ (k ) = the experimental greenhouse for the smart monitor project. The
τ
∑l = 1 ρl (k ) (12) greenhouse is divided into 6 subregions for the deployment of WSNs
with the cluster-based structure, and each cluster contain 20 sensor
The unstable communication link and multi-hop transmission in
nodes. According to the system model and observation model presented
WSNs would increase the possibility of packet loss. The packet loss
in Section 2, considering the real requirement of CO2 concentration
could decrease the integrity of the monitored information, which would
monitor in the greenhouse, let the sampling interval of sensor nodes be
depress the estimation accuracy of CO2 concentration. In order to en-
5 minutes. Moreover, A and Hi are set as 1, and variances Q and Ri are
hance the estimation accuracy, we propose a modified estimation
set as 25.
scheme here whose main idea is to combine the previous fusion result
In the following parts, the simulation analysis mainly focuses on the
of the cluster with the current fusion result on the relevance analysis of
distributed consensus estimation of sensor nodes with the dynamic link,
the available data, thereby accounting for the continuity of the green-
and the data fusion estimation at the cluster head node considering the
house environmental change. The modified estimation is expressed as
packet loss because of the distributed transmission and the dynamic
follows:
topology of WSNs.
x ic (k ) = αx ic (k − 1) + (1 − α ) x iĉ (k ) (13)
4.1. Consensus–Kalman filter estimation analysis with the dynamic link
where the coefficient α is an adjustable factor and 0 < α < 1.
Remark 3. Due to the unreliability of communication link and the For the distributed Consensus–Kalman filter, we investigate the es-
dynamic network topology of WSNs for data transmission, sensor nodes timation performance of the sensor node with the same topology as
transmit data to the head node through the dynamic route. Due node 4 shown in Fig. 3. In Fig. 3, sensor node 2 is not connected with
primarily to the limited bandwidth of the network channels, both node 4 at the current moment, which would affect the performance of
multi-hop transmission and topology dynamic changes could lead to the consensus estimation. In this experiment, 3 of 4 neighbor nodes is
packet losses, and such a phenomenon could be more prevalent as the selected randomly to participate in the consensus estimation at node 4.
network size increases. As such, the proposed regional estimation In Fig. 4, the data fusion results on the Consensus–Kalman filter are
scheme on the cluster-based structure is propitious to the reliable shown. The red curve is the fusion estimation with 4 neighbor nodes,

Fig. 5. Difference of fusion results with different number of neighbor

nodes.

123
X. Bai et al.
and the blue curve is the fused result with 3 neighbor nodes. As shown
in Fig. 5, we can observe that the difference of the two results is ob-
vious. As is well known, the dynamic link between sensor nodes is
mainly caused by the channel competition and interference during the
communication process. In order to enhance the stability of the wireless
link, the reasonable scheduling of correlated sensor nodes is a better
way, which should be in the premise of the coverage rate and the en-
ergy efficiency of WSNs.
4.2. Data fusion analysis at the cluster head with unreliable transmission
Sensor nodes transmit their fused data to the corresponding head
node for further estimation to get the precise description of CO2 con-
centration in the subregion of the greenhouse for the distributed control
action. As mentioned in Section 3, the dynamic topology and multi-hop
transmission increase the probability of packet loss for the data fusion
at the head node. In this simulation, the fusion performance is analysed
when the packet loss rate is assumed to be 10%, 20% and 30%, re-
spectively. In Fig. 6, the difference of estimation results between the
fusion with and without packet loss is shown. We can observe that with
the increase of packet loss rate, the difference is getting bigger ob-
viously. In Fig. 7, the fused curve with packet loss rate 10% is more
close to the curve without packet loss than that with rate 20% and 30%.
In order to improve the estimation accuracy at the head node, the
previous estimation of the last moment can be used to reduce the
fluctuation impact caused by the packet loss from member nodes. As the
description in Eq. (13), coefficient α can reduce the effect caused by
dynamic connectivity of sensor nodes on the fusion result at the head
node. In Fig. 8, the difference of the fusion results with no packet loss
and the modified result with packet loss rate 20% are shown, and we
can observe that the difference is smaller with bigger α. In addition, the
124
Information Fusion 42 (2018) 119–126
Fig. 6. Difference of fusion result between the estimation with and
without packet loss.
modified results with different α are shown in Fig. 9, and the fluctuation
of modified results with α = 0.3 are relatively smaller than that with
α = 0.2 and α = 0.1. The appropriate α is in favor of improving the
estimation accuracy.
5. Conclusion
In this paper, we have studied the data fusion problem over WSNs
for the CO2 concentration monitoring in the greenhouse. Considering
the feature of non-uniform distribution of CO2 concentration in the
greenhouse with the large scale, a regional estimation method has been
proposed for the WSNs with the cluster-based structure, which is ben-
eficial for improving the estimation performance of the CO2 con-
centration in the greenhouse. Since the measurement of CO2 con-
centration is easily influenced by environmental factors, a distributed
fusion estimation approach using Consensus–Kalman filters has been
developed to improve the estimation accuracy of CO2 concentration,
while the sensory data are sent to the head node by the distributed
transmission in WSNs. In view of the packet loss brought by the dy-
namic topology and multi-hop transmission in WSNs, a modified esti-
mation scheme is utilized that combines previous fusion result of the
cluster after the fusion on the relevance analysis of the available data
from member nodes. Simulation results have demonstrated that the
proposed algorithms have improved the data fusion accuracy. In addi-
tion, there are some interesting topics of research for future investiga-
tion for the accurate estimation of CO2 concentration in the greenhouse.
Such topics include, but are not limited to, node scheduling for the
balanced energy consumption [2], data recovery of the failed node,
data fusion with asynchronous measurement [12,26,28], energy-effi-
cient distributed kalman filtering [47] and incomplete information
[7,10] for more complicated systems [31–46].
Fig. 7. Fusion estimation at the head node with different packet loss
rate.
X. Bai et al.
References
[1] X. Bai, S. Li, J. Xu, Mobile sensor deployment optimization for k-coverage in
wireless sensor networks with a limited mobility model, IETE Technical Rev. 27 (2)
(2010) 124–137.
[2] X. Bai, S. Li, Y. Hong, K. Liu, Mobile agent dynamic route algorithm for WSNs on
balanced energy consumption, Inf. Technol. J. 13 (5) (2014) 832–838.
[3] C. Chen, J. Yan, N. Lu, Y. Wang, X. Yang, X. Guan, Ubiquitous monitoring for in-
dustrial cyber-physical systems over relay-assisted wireless sensor networks, IEEE
Trans. Emerg. Top Comput. 3 (3) (2015) 352–362.
[4] J. Chen, X. Cao, P. Cheng, Y. Xiao, Y. Sun, Distributed collaborative control for
industrial automation with wireless sensor and actuator networks, IEEE Trans. Ind.
Electron. 57 (12) (2010) 4219–4229.
[5] S. Chen, Z. Zou, C. He, Z. Zhang, X. Yang, Rules of CO2 concentration change under
organic soil cultivation and effects of CO2 application on tomato plants in solar
greenhouse, Acta Botanica Boreali-Occidentalia Sinica 24 (9) (2004) 1624–1629.
[6] W. Cheng, X. Yang, L. Wang, Data fusion of the wireless sensor network in green-
house, Proceedings of 2nd International Conference on Consumer Electronics,
Communications and Networks (CECNet) Yichang, China, (2012), pp. 957–961.
[7] H. Dong, Z. Wang, H. Gao, Distributed filtering for a class of time-varying systems
over sensor networks with quantization errors and successive packet dropouts, IEEE
Trans. Signal Process. 60 (6) (2012) 3164–3173.
[8] H. Dong, Z. Wang, D.W.C. Ho, H. Gao, Variance constrained h∞ filtering for a class
of nonlinear time-varying systems with multiple missing measurements: the finite
horizon case, IEEE Trans. Signal Process. 58 (5) (2010) 2534–2543.
[9] H. Dong, Z. Wang, S. Ding, H. Gao, A survey on distributed filtering and fault de-
tection for sensor networks, Math. Problems Eng. (2014) 1–7.
[10] H. Dong, Z. Wang, H. Gao, Distributed h∞ filtering for a class of Markovian jump
nonlinear time-delay systems over lossy sensor networks, IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron.
60 (10) (2013) 4665–4672.
[11] D.A. Gelder, J.A. Dieleman, G.P.A. Bot, L.F.M. Marcelis, An overview of climate and
crop yield in closed greenhouses, J. Hortic. Sci. Biotechnol. 87 (3) (2012) 193–202.
[12] Y.Y. Hu, Z.S. Duan, D.H. Zhou, Estimation fusion with general asynchronous multi-
rate sensors, IEEE Trans. Aerosp. Electron. Syst. 46 (4) (2010) 2090–2102.
[13] H. Jiang, J.O. Hallstrom, Fast, accurate event classification on resource-lean em-
bedded sensors, ACM Trans. Auton. Adapt. Syst. 9 (5) (2011). 39:1–23
[14] D. Lee, K. Lee, C. Choi, H. Kim, S. Chung, Y. Cho, Prediction of CO2 emission from
soil for optimal greenhouse control, ASABE Annual International Meeting,
Louisville, Kentucky, August, (2011), pp. 7–10.
125
Information Fusion 42 (2018) 119–126
Fig. 8. Difference of the fusion without packet loss and modified
result with packet loss.
Fig. 9. Modified estimation of CO2 concentration with different α.
[15] T. Li, M. Zhang, Y. Ji, S. Sha, Y. Jiang, M. Li, Management of co2 in a tomato
greenhouse using WSN and BPNN techniques, Int. J. Agric. Biol. Eng. 8 (4) (2015)
43–51.
[16] J. Liang, Z. Wang, X. Liu, Distributed state estimation for discrete-time sensor
networks with randomly varying nonlinearities and missing measurements, IEEE
Trans. Neural Netw. 22 (3) (2011) 486–496.
[17] O. Mirabella, M. Brischetto, A hybrid wired/wireless networking infrastructure for
greenhouse management, IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas. 60 (2) (2011) 398–407.
[18] R. Olfati-Saber, P. Jalalkamali, Coupled distributed estimation and control for
mobile sensor networks, IEEE Trans. Automat. Contr. 57 (9) (2012) 1–7.
[19] A. Ramírez-Arias, F. Rodríguez, J.L. Guzmán, M. Berenguel, Multiobjective hier-
archical control architecture for greenhouse crop growth, Automatica 48 (3) (2012)
490–498.
[20] B. Shen, Z. Wang, X. Liu, A stochastic sampled-data approach to distributed h∞
filtering in sensor networks, IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. I 58 (9) (2011) 2237–2246.
[21] P. Vance, M.H. Spalding, Growth, photosynthesis, and gene expression in chlamy-
domonas over a range of CO2 concentrations and CO2/O2 ratios: co2 regulates
multiple acclimation states, Canadian J. Botany 83 (7) (2005) 796–809.
[22] J. Wang, H. Xue, X. Jiang, Application of Kalman filtering algorithm in greenhouse
environment monitoring, Proceedings of the 2013 International Symposium on
Instrumentation and Measurement, Sensor Network and Automation, (2013), pp.
539–554. Ontario, Canada, Dec.
[23] Y. Wang, J. Xie, J. Yu, J. Lü, X. Wang, Variations of CO2 concentration in solar
greenhouse on sand land with tomato substrates cultivation, J. Gansu Agri.
University 47 (6) (2012) 57–62.
[24] M. Xiang, M. Zhang, Control of CO2 based on two kinds of neural network in
greenhouse, Agricultural Technol. Equipment 184 (2) (2010) 11–12.
[25] R.R. Yager, The power average operator, IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. 31 (6)
(2001) 724–731.
[26] L.P. Yan, B.S. Liu, D.H. Zhou, Asynchronous multirate multisensory information
fusion algorithm, IEEE Trans. Aerosp. Electron Syst. 43 (3) (2007) 1135–1146.
[27] L. Zhang, D. Li, L. Zhang, C. Zhong, A weighted fusion algorithm of multi-sensor
based on optimized grouping, Proceedings of the 6th World Congress on Intelligent
Control and Automation, (2006), pp. 5350–5353. Dalian, China, Jun.
[28] W. Zhang, S. Liu, L. Yu, Fusion estimation for sensor networks with nonuniform
estimation rates, IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. I Regul. Pap. 61 (5) (2014) 1485–1498.
[29] S. Zhu, C. Chen, X. Guan, Distributed optimal consensus filter for target tracking in
heterogeneous sensor networks, Proceeding of 8th Asian Control Conference,
(2011), pp. 806–811. 15–18
[30] S. Zhu, C. Chen, X. Guan, Sensor deployment for distributed estimation in
X. Bai et al. Information Fusion 42 (2018) 119–126

heterogeneous wireless sensor networks, Ad Hoc Sensor Wireless Netw. 16 (4)
(2012) 297–322.
[31] D. Ding, Z. Wang, D.W.C. Ho, G. Wei, Observer-based event-triggering consensus
control for multiagent systems with lossy sensors and cyber-attacks, IEEE Trans.
Cybern. 47 (8) (2017) 1936–1947.
[32] D. Ding, Z. Wang, D.W.C. Ho, G. Wei, Distributed recursive filtering for stochastic
systems under uniform quantizations and deception attacks through sensor net-
works, Automatica 78 (2017) 231–240.
[33] D. Ding, Z. Wang, G. Wei, F.E. Alsaadi, Event-based security control for discrete-
time stochastic systems, IET Control Theory Appl. 10 (15) (2016) 1808–1815.
[34] Y. Luo, Z. Wang, G. Wei, F.E. Alsaadi, Robust h∞ filtering for a class of two-di-
mensional uncertain fuzzy systems with randomly occurring mixed delays, IEEE
Trans. Fuzzy Syst. 25 (1) (2017) 70–83.
[35] Y. Luo, Z. Wang, J. Liang, G. Wei, F.E. Alsaadi, h∞ control for 2-d fuzzy systems
with interval time-varying delays and missing measurements, IEEE Trans. Cybern.
47 (2) (2017) 365–377.
[36] L. Wang, Z. Wang, T. Huang, G. Wei, An event-triggered approach to state esti-
mation for a class of complex networks with mixed time delays and nonlinearities,
IEEE Trans. Cybern. 46 (11) (2016) 2497–2508.
[37] J. Zhang, L. Ma, Y. Liu, Passivity analysis for discrete-time neural networks with
mixed time-delays and randomly occurring quantization effects, Neurocomputing
216 (2016) 657–665.
[38] W. Zhang, Z. Wang, Y. Liu, D. Ding, F.E. Alsaadi, Event-based state estimation for a
class of complex networks with time-varying delays: a comparison principle ap-
proach, Phys. Lett. A 381 (1) (2017) 10–18.
[39] Y. Liu, W. Liu, M.A. Obaid, I.A. Abbas, Exponential stability of markovian jumping
cohen-grossberg neural networks with mixed mode-dependent time-delays,
Neurocomputing 177 (2016) 409–415.
[40] S. Liu, G. Wei, Y. Song, Y. Liu, Extended kalman filtering for stochastic nonlinear
systems with randomly occurring cyber attacks, Neurocomputing 207 (2016)
708–716.
[41] D. Liu, Y. Liu, F.E. Alsaadi, A new framework for output feedback controller design
for a class of discrete-time stochastic nonlinear system with quantization and
missing measurement, Int. J. Gen. Syst. 45 (5) (2016) 517–531.
[42] C. Wen, Y. Cai, Y. Liu, C. Wen, A reduced-order approach to filtering for systems
with linear equality constraints, Neurocomputing 193 (2016) 219–226.
[43] N. Zeng, Z. Wang, H. Zhang, Inferring nonlinear lateral flow immunoassay state-
space models via an unscented Kalman filter, Sci. China Inf. Sci. 59 (11) (2016).
Art. No. 112204. doi:10.1007/s11432-016-0280-9 .
[44] H. Chen, J. Liang, Z. Wang, Pinning controllability of autonomous Boolean control
networks, Sci. China Inf. Sci. 59 (7) (2016) 070107, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/
s11432-016-5579-8.
[45] Y. Yuan, H. Yuan, Z. Wang, L. Guo, H. Yang, Optimal control for networked control
systems with disturbances: a delta operator approach, IET Control Theory Appl. 11
(9) (2017) 1325–1332.
[46] Y. Yuan, L. Guo, Z. Wang, Composite control of linear quadratic games in delta
domain with disturbance observers, J. Franklin Inst. 354 (4) (2017) 1673–1695.
[47] C. Wang, X. Chen, W. Li, Energy efficient distributed Kalman filter for wireless
sensor networks, Proc. IEEE 11th International Conference on Networking, Sensing
and Control, 7–9 Miami FL, USA, (2014), pp. 161–166.

126