Adaptive joint quantization and power allocation in wireless sensor networks

We consider a system in which distributed sensors observe a common source, quantize their observations and communicate with a remote fusion center whose role is to reconstruct the source with minimal distortion. We design a novel joint quantization and power allocation scheme for this system that minimizes reconstruction distortion by taking into account the quality of observations at the sensors, their spatial correlation, and the communication channel to the fusion center. The analysis shows how much power and bits should be allocated at each sensor. Simulation results illustrate that the sensors with low correlation with the source, high correlation with other sensors observations, poor observation quality and/or bad communication channels quantize coarsely and transmit with small power. The results also show that the design outperforms a quantization scheme based on uniform power allocation.