  Distributed estimation based on measurements from multiple wireless sensors
is investigated. It is assumed that a group of sensors observe the same
quantity in independent additive observation noises with possibly different
variances. The observations are transmitted using amplify-and-forward (analog)
transmissions over non-ideal fading wireless channels from the sensors to a
fusion center, where they are combined to generate an estimate of the observed
quantity. Assuming that the Best Linear Unbiased Estimator (BLUE) is used by
the fusion center, the equal-power transmission strategy is first discussed,
where the system performance is analyzed by introducing the concept of
estimation outage and estimation diversity, and it is shown that there is an
achievable diversity gain on the order of the number of sensors. The optimal
power allocation strategies are then considered for two cases: minimum
distortion under power constraints; and minimum power under distortion
constraints. In the first case, it is shown that by turning off bad sensors,
i.e., sensors with bad channels and bad observation quality, adaptive power
gain can be achieved without sacrificing diversity gain. Here, the adaptive
power gain is similar to the array gain achieved in Multiple-Input
Single-Output (MISO) multi-antenna systems when channel conditions are known to
the transmitter. In the second case, the sum power is minimized under
zero-outage estimation distortion constraint, and some related energy
efficiency issues in sensor networks are discussed.
