Motivated by the increasing availability and quality of miniaturized sensors, computers, and wireless communication devices and given their enormous potential, the use of wireless sensor networks (WSN) has become widespread. Because in many applications of WSNs one is required to estimate at each local sensor unit the state of a system given the measurements acquired by multiple sensors, there has been a flurry of activity related to the theory of distributed state estimation. This article contains a literature survey of distributed state estimation for discrete-time linear time invariant systems. In order to obtain the proper historical context, we review the state of the art in this field and summarize previous work. To provide the mathematical intuition behind some of the methods, this survey paper reproduces some of the main results given in the literature. It also provides a critical appraisal of the state of the art and affords the reader a comprehensive presentation of the most relevant results published so far.

由于小型传感器，计算机和无线通信设备的可用性和质量不断提高，并且具有巨大的潜力，因此无线传感器网络（WSN）的使用已变得广泛。因为在WSN的许多应用中，需要给定每个本地传感器单元在多个传感器获取的测量值的情况下估计系统的状态，所以存在与分布式状态估计理论有关的一系列活动。本文包含有关离散时间线性时不变系统的分布状态估计的文献综述。为了获得适当的历史背景，我们回顾了该领域的最新技术并总结了以前的工作。为了提供某些方法背后的数学直觉，本调查论文再现了文献中给出的一些主要结果。它还对现有技术水平进行了严格的评估，并为读者提供了迄今为止已发表的最相关结果的全面介绍。