Reduced overhead distributed consensus-based estimation algorithm

We consider a cooperation among nodes in a network which aim to reconstruct a common broadcast message. Distributed estimation algorithms are highly suited for such a scenario. Nevertheless, communication overhead due to an exchange of variables among nodes can be problematic concerning energy efficiency and costs. In this paper, we present a Reduced Overhead Distributed Consensus-based Estimation (RO-DiCE) algorithm exhibiting a significantly reduced communication overhead in comparison to its unreduced version, the DiCE algorithm. However, by reducing the overhead a possible degradation in estimation performance of the algorithm is introduced. We investigate the RO-DiCE algorithm in terms of communication overhead, convergence behavior and error rate performance for different network topologies. We will show that for a full mesh topology the RO-DiCE algorithm is identical to the DiCE algorithm.