Optimal and Suboptimal Decentralized Estimation Underlying Fading Channels in WSNs

Optimal and suboptimal estimators in wireless sensor networks with Rayleigh fading channels are studied in this paper. A maximum likelihood estimator is introduced to combat both the observation noise and communication errors led by channel fading. A feasible suboptimal estimator is presented to reduce the computational complexity. Compared with the traditional methods with different transmission coding schemes, it is shown by simulations that the proposed estimators can reduce the mean square error of the estimation especially for low communication SNR.