Quantizer Design Optimized for Distributed Estimation

We consider the problem of optimizing the quantizer design for distributed estimation systems where all nodes located at different sites collect measurements and transmit quantized data to a fusion node, which then produces an estimate of the parameter of interest. For this problem, the goal is to minimize the amount of information that the nodes have to transmit in order to attain a certain application accuracy. We propose an iterative quantizer design algorithm that seeks to find a non-regular mapping between quantization partitions and their codewords so as to minimize global distortion such as the estimation error. We apply the proposed algorithm to a system where an acoustic amplitude sensor model is employed at each node for source localization. Our experiments demonstrate that a significant performance gain can be achieved by our technique as compared with standard typical designs and even with distributed novel designs recently published.