Quantization and power allocation in wireless sensor networks with correlated data

This work addresses the problem of joint quantization and power allocation in wireless sensor networks where sensors observe a source, quantize their observations and transmit to a fusion center (FC) which reconstructs the source using linear minimum mean-squared error (LMMSE) estimation rule. The sensors employ scalar quantizers to quantize the observations. We formulate the reconstruction distortion without imposing any statistical structure on the quantization noise and without making any simplifying assumption about the contribution of the channel errors to the reconstruction distortion. Based on the formulation, we outline a solution to the problem of joint quantization and power allocation based on minimization of the distortion subject to a constraint on the network transmit power. We illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution with some numerical examples.