Source extraction in bandwidth constrained wireless sensor networks

Source extraction was traditionally done by sensor arrays. Recently, sensor networks have been considered as promising candidates for extraction of multiple sources. In a sensor network, each sensor observes an instantaneous linear mixture of the sources and their observations are corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise. Two sensor network models are adopted. The first one is. cluster based, in which a sensor acts as cluster head and performs local extraction of the sources based on its own observation and the received quantized data from the cluster members. Then, the extracted signal is quantized and the quantized data are sent to the sink while the sink performs global extraction of the sources. The other one is cluster free, in which data collected by the sensors are quantized and sent to the sink directly. Then, the sink performs global extraction of the sources. The proposed schemes are evaluated against the benchmarking case where the sensor observations are undistorted. Index Terms--Blind source extraction, distributed estimation, wireless sensor network.