Efficient Digital Encoding and Estimation of Noisy Signals

Abstract

In many applications in science and engineering one must rely on coarsely quantized and often unreliable noisy measurements in order to accurately and reliably estimate quantities of interest. This scenario arises, for instance, in distributed wireless sensor networks where measurements made at remote sensors need to be fused at a host site in order to decipher an information-bearing signal. Resources such as bandwidth, power, and hardware are usually limited and shared across the network. Consequently, each sensor may be severely constrained in the amount of information it can communicate to the host and the complexity of the processing it can perform. In this thesis, we develop a versatile framework for designing low-complexity algorithms for efficient digital encoding of the measurements at each sensor, and for accurate signal estimation from these encodings at the host. We show that the use of a properly designed and often easily implemented control input added prior to signal quantization can significantly enhance overall system performance. In particular, efficient estimators can be constructed and used with optimized pseudo-noise, deterministic, and feedback-based control inputs, resulting in a hierarchy of practical systems with very attractive performance-complexity characteristics.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 01, 1998
Accession Number
ADA455734

Entities

People

  • Haralabos C. Papadopoulos

Organizations

  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes
  • Sensors

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Coding
  • Computer Programs
  • Data Processing
  • Detection
  • Detectors
  • Electrical Engineering
  • Estimators
  • Gaussian Processes
  • Information Science
  • Kalman Filters
  • Mathematical Filters
  • Military Research
  • Random Variables
  • Robot Navigation
  • Sensor Networks
  • Signal Processing
  • Wireless Sensor Networks

Fields of Study

  • Engineering

Readers

  • Adaptive Control and Estimation with Uncertainty in Dynamic Systems.
  • Distributed Systems and Data Platform Development
  • Radio communications and signal processing.