New Design Principles for Estimation over Fading Channels in Mobile Sensor Networks

In this paper we provide new design principles for estimation over wireless fading channels in mobile sensor networks. We show how to optimize receiver and transmitter designs to improve estimation performance in the application layer. On the receiver side, we show that the optimum packet drop mechanism is the one that provides a balance between information loss and communication noise. On the transmitter side, we show how to optimize and adapt the transmission rate for performance improvement in the application layer. We further provide stability conditions for different design strategies. The work confirms that delay-sensitive mobile sensor applications require new design paradigms and applying the same design principles of data networks can lead to performance degradation. The work also highlights the importance of cross-layer feedback and provides alternative designs if such feedbacks are not available.