A Joint Model and Data Driven Method for Distributed Estimation

This article considers the problem of distributed estimation in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which is anticipated to support a wide range of applications, such as the environmental monitoring, weather forecasting, and location estimation. To this end, we propose a joint model and data driven distributed estimation method by designing the optimal quantizers and fusion center (FC) based on the Bayesian and minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterions. First, universal mean square error (MSE) lower bound for the quantization-based distributed estimation is derived and adopted as the design metric for the quantizers. Then, the optimality of the mean-fusion operation for the FC with MMSE criterion is proved. Next, by exploiting different levels of the statistic information of the desired parameter and observation noise, a joint model and data driven method is proposed to train parts of the quantizer and FC modules as deep neural networks (DNNs), and two loss functions derived from the MMSE criterion are adopted for the sequential training scheme. Furthermore, we extend the above results to the case with multibit quantizers, considering both the parallel and one-hot quantization schemes. Finally, simulation results reveal that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art schemes in typical scenarios.