Localized Recursive Estimation in Energy Constrained Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper proposes a localized recursive estimation scheme for parameter estimation in wireless sensor networks. Given any parameter of a target occurring at some location and time, a number of sensors recursively estimate the parameter by using their local measurements of the parameter that is attenuated with the distance between a sensor and the target location and corrupted by noise. Compared with centralized estimation schemes that transmit all encoded measurements to a sink (or a fusion center), the recursive scheme needs only to transmit the final estimate to a sink. When the sink is far away from the sensors and multihop communications have to be used, using localized recursive estimation can help to reduce energy consumption and reduce network traffic load.