Universal Distributed Estimation Scheme for a Bandwidth Constrained Ad Hoc Sensor Network

This paper describes a distributed estimation scheme (DES) for a bandwidth constrained ad hoc sensor network. The DES is universal in the sense that operations on all sensors are identical and independent of noise distribution. The scheme requires each sensor to transmit just a 1-bit message per observation. Simulation results show that the scheme achieves much better mean-squares error (MSE) performance than the simplified isotropic universal DES and even outperforms the isotropic universal DES which requires more than twice the bandwidth of this scheme.