Blind decentralized estimation for bandwidth constrained wireless sensor networks

Recently proposed decentralized, distributed estimation and power scheduling methods for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) do not consider errors occurring during the transmission of binary observations from the sensors to fusion center. In this letter, we extend the decentralized estimation model to the case in which imperfect transmission channels are considered. The proposed estimators, which operate on additive channel noise corrupted versions of quantized noisy sensor observations, are approached from a maximum likelihood (ML) perspective. Complicating this approach is the fact that the noise distribution is rarely fully known to the fusion center. Here we assume the distribution is known but not the defining parameters, e.g., variance. The resulting incomplete data estimation problem is approached from a expectation-maximization (EM) perspective. The critical initialization and convergence aspects of the EM algorithm are investigated. Furthermore, the estimation of the source parameter is extended to the blind case where both the channel and sensor noise parameters are unknown. Finally, numerical experiments are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed estimators.