We design the robust and inherently fault tolerant decetralized$$H^infty$$ filter for the multisensor state estimation problem when there are insufficient priori informations on the statistical properties of external disturbances. For developing the proposed algorithm, an alternative form of suboptimal$$H^infty$$ filter equations are formulated by applying an alternative form of Kalman filter equations to the indefinite inner product space state model of suboptimal$$H^infty$$ filtering problems. The decentralized$$H^infty$$ filter that consists of local and central fusion filters can be designed effciently using the proposed alternative$$H^infty$$ filiter gain equations. The proposed decentralized$$H^infty$$ filter is robust against un-known external disturbances since it bounds the maximum energy gain from the external disturbances to the estimation errors under the prescribed level$$r^2$$ in both local and central fusion filters and is also fault tolerant due to its inherent redundancy. In addition, the central fusion equations between the global and local data can reduce the unnecessary calculation burden effectively. Computer simulations are made to ceritfy the robustness and fault tolerance of the proposed algorithm.