Spatial Whitening Framework for Distributed Estimation
Swarnendu Kar, Pramod K. Varshney, Hao Chen · 2011
Abstract—Designing resource allocation strategies for power constrained sensor network in the presence of correlated data often gives rise to intractable problem formulations. In such sit-uations, applying well-known strategies derived from conditional-independence assumption may turn out to be fairly suboptimal. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing an adjacency-based spatial whitening scheme, where each sensor exchanges its obser-vation with their neighbors prior to encoding their own private in-formation and transmitting it to the fusion center. We comment on the computational limitations for obtaining the optimal whitening transformation, and propose an iterative optimization scheme to achieve the same for large networks. We demonstrate the efficacy of the whitening framework by considering the example of bit-allocation for distributed estimation. I.