Communication efficient channel estimation over distributed networks

Abstract

We study diffusion based channel estimation in distributed architectures suitable for various communication applications such as cognitive radios. Although the demand for distributed processing is steadily growing, these architectures require a substantial amount of communication among their nodes (or processing elements) causing significant energy consumption and increase in carbon footprint. Due to growing awareness of telecommunication industry's impact on the environment, the need to mitigate this problem is indisputable. To this end, we introduce algorithms significantly reducing the communication load between distributed nodes, which is the main cause in energy consumption, while providing outstanding performance. In this framework, after each node produces its local estimate of the communication channel, a single bit or a couple of bits of information is generated using certain random projections. This newly generated data is diffused and then used in neighboring nodes to recover the original full information, i.e., the channel estimate of the desired communication channel. We provide the complete state-space description of these algorithms and demonstrate the substantial gains through our experiments.