Quality of estimation guaranteed energy efficient sensor selection in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we study the sensor selection problem for parameter estimation in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to minimize the energy consumption with guaranteed quality of estimation. We adopt the Best Linear Unbiased Estimator (BLUE) as the fusion algorithm, and the Mean Squared Error (MSE) criterion to measure the quality of estimation. We formulate the problem as a constrained optimization problem, and prove that it is NP-Complete. A greedy algorithm and a heuristic algorithm are proposed based on the variances of the noises and the energy-accuracy ratio (EAR) of the sensors respectively. Extensive simulation results show that the heuristic algorithm can achieve superior performance than the greedy algorithm in both the energy consumption and the quality of estimation.