On the Asymptotic Efficiency of Distributed Estimation Systems With Constant Modulus Signals Over Multiple-Access Channels

A distributed estimation problem is considered with multiple-access channels between sensors and a fusion center. The sensors phase-modulate their noisy observations before transmitting them to the fusion center, where a signal parameter is estimated. The asymptotic efficiency of this estimator is then determined by using two inequalities that relate the Fisher information and the characteristic function. A necessary and sufficient condition for equality is found for the first time in the literature. The loss in efficiency of the distributed estimation scheme relative to the centralized approach is quantified for different sensing noise distributions. It is shown that this distributed estimation system does not incur an efficiency loss if and only if the sensing noise distribution is Gaussian.