  In this paper, we consider performance analysis of the decentralized power
method for the eigendecomposition of the sample covariance matrix based on the
averaging consensus protocol. An analytical expression of the second order
statistics of the eigenvectors obtained from the decentralized power method
which is required for computing the mean square error (MSE) of subspace-based
estimators is presented. We show that the decentralized power method is not an
asymptotically consistent estimator of the eigenvectors of the true measurement
covariance matrix unless the averaging consensus protocol is carried out over
an infinitely large number of iterations. Moreover, we introduce the
decentralized ESPRIT algorithm which yields fully decentralized
direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimates. Based on the performance analysis of the
decentralized power method, we derive an analytical expression of the MSE of
DOA estimators using the decentralized ESPRIT algorithm. The validity of our
asymptotic results is demonstrated by simulations.
