Sensor Selection Strategy and Opportunistic Scheduling Protocol for Relay-Aided Decentralized Estimation in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we consider decentralized estimation of a noise-corrupted deterministic parameter in wireless sensor networks with the aid of relay. We propose a new relay-aided decentralized estimation scheme by which relay collects the overheard messages from sensors, computes a local message, and then sends it to a destination. Besides, we develop the sensor selection policies to select the most appropriate sensor for observation transmission, and then propose the opportunistic scheduling protocol for decentralized estimation to allow relay to perform cooperation transmission opportunistically. Numerical simulation shows the proposed strategies can provide better estimation performance without any bandwidth loss.