Linear Coherent Decentralized Estimation

The authors consider the distributed estimation of an unknown vector signal in a resource constrained sensor network with a fusion center. Due to power and bandwidth limitations, each sensor compresses its data in order to minimize the amount of information that needs to be communicated to the fusion center. In this paper, they study the linear decentralized estimation of the source vector, where each sensor linearly encodes its observations and the fusion center also applies a linear mapping to estimate the unknown vector signal based on the received messages. They adopt the Mean Squared Error (MSE) as the performance criterion.