Energy Planning for Progressive Estimation in Multihop Sensor Networks

Multihop sensor networks where transmissions are conducted between neighboring sensors can be more efficient in energy and spectrum than single-hop sensor networks where transmissions are conducted directly between each sensor and a fusion center. With the knowledge of a routing tree from all sensors to a destination node, we present a digital transmission energy planning algorithm as well as an analog transmission energy planning algorithm for progressive estimation in multihop sensor networks. Unlike many iterative consensus-type algorithms, the proposed progressive estimation algorithms along with their transmission energy planning further reduce the network transmission energy while guaranteeing any pre-specified estimation performance at the destination node within a finite time. We also show that digital transmission is more efficient in transmission energy than analog transmission if the available transmission time-bandwidth product for each link and each observation sample is not too limited.