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

Abstract

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 multiuser 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 Cancelation (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 problem under a distortion constraint. For both cases, we consider the system performance under different operating conditions, and we demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed scheme compared to a system that employs optimized sensor selection under orthogonal transmissions. © 2015 IEEE.