Distributed and Collaborative Estimation over Wireless Sensor Networks

A new distributed algorithm for cooperative estimation of a slowly time-varying signal using a wireless sensor network is presented. The estimate in each node is based on a so called consensus algorithm, which weights measurements and estimates of neighboring nodes. The algorithm is therefore scalable with the number of network nodes. It requires only limited information exchange between nodes and computations in each node. The weights are locally optimized based on a minimum variance criterion. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm exhibits good performance compared to other distributed algorithms proposed in the literature