Effect of the Channel Estimation Error on the Performance of the Source Estimator in a Wireless Sensor Network with Orthogonal Channels

Abstract

In this work effect of the channel estimation error on the MSE performance of the source estimator in a wireless sensor network with orthogonal flat fading channels is studied. A two-phase approach was employed where in the first phase the orthogonal fading channel coefficients are estimated and in the second phase channel estimates and sensor observations transmitted to fusion center are used for the source estimation. We consider a sensor network in which the channel estimates are fed-back to the sensors for optimal power allocation which leads to switch off the sensors with bad channels in the second phase. We also show that training power should be at least half of the total power. Our analytical findings are corroborated by simulation results.