Distributed Estimation in Wireless Sensor Networks With an Interference Canceling Fusion Center

—In this paper, we consider Distributed Estimation (DES) in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and assume that the number of sensors in the WSN is larger than the available number of transmission slots. With classic DES, the sensors independently transmit the sampled digitized data. However, the WSN is an uplink multi-user channel where multiple sources share the channel for communicating data to a Fusion Center (FC). To this aim, we adopt the optimal communication scheme for this setup that suggests interfering transmissions and the use of Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) at the FC. We propose a joint SIC decoder and linear Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) estimator for digital interfering transmission of correlated data. We further introduce an optimization framework that schedules and allocates power to the sensors optimally. We formulate the problem in two ways: an expected distortion minimization problem under a total power budget, and a transmission power minimization pr...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: TWC
• Authors: Antonios Argyriou, Özgü Alay
• Keywords: TWC 2016