This paper describes the effect of channel estimation error (CEE) on the performance of distributed estimations of an unknown parameter in a wireless sensor network. Both the classical and Bayesian estimators are derived to mitigate the adverse effects caused by the CEE. Power scheduling among sensors and the power ratio between the training and data transmission at each individual node are optimized by directly minimizing the final average mean squared error to compensate for the CEE. A closed-form power scheduling policy is given for a homogeneous environment, which shows that more than 50% of the power should be allocated to sensor observation transmissions. For an inhomogeneous environment, a multilevel waterfilling type solution is developed for the power scheduling among sensors for only the sum power constraint with a “cave” waterfilling solution for both the sum and individual power constraints. Simulations show that the proposed power scheduling schemes achieve better performance than the equal power scheduling scheme.

This paper considers the distributed estimation of a source parameter using quantized sensor observations in a wireless sensor network with noisy channels. Repetition codes are used to transmit quantization bits of sensor observations and a quasi best linear unbiased estimate is constructed to estimate the source parameter. Simulations show that the estimation scheme achieves a better power and spectral efficiency than the previous scheme.

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.