  We consider the design of identical one-bit probabilistic quantizers for
distributed estimation in sensor networks. We assume the parameter-range to be
finite and known and use the maximum Cram\'er-Rao Lower Bound (CRB) over the
parameter-range as our performance metric. We restrict our theoretical analysis
to the class of antisymmetric quantizers and determine a set of conditions for
which the probabilistic quantizer function is greatly simplified. We identify a
broad class of noise distributions, which includes Gaussian noise in the
low-SNR regime, for which the often used threshold-quantizer is found to be
minimax-optimal. Aided with theoretical results, we formulate an optimization
problem to obtain the optimum minimax-CRB quantizer. For a wide range of noise
distributions, we demonstrate the superior performance of the new quantizer -
particularly in the moderate to high-SNR regime.
