Distributed Signal Processing Algorithms for Wireless Networks

Distributed signal processing algorithms have become a key approach for statistical inference in wireless networks and applications such as wireless sensor networks and smart grids. It is well known that distributed processing techniques deal with the extraction of information from data collected at nodes that are distributed over a geographic area. In this context, for each specific node, a set of neighbor nodes collect their local information and transmit the estimates to a specific node. Then, each specific node combines the collected information together with its local estimate to generate an improved estimate. In this thesis, novel distributed cooperative algorithms for inference in ad hoc, wireless sensor networks and smart grids are investigated. Low-complexity and effective algorithms to perform statistical inference in a distributed way are devised. A number of innovative approaches for dealing with node failures, compression of data and exchange of information are proposed and summarized as follows: Firstly, distributed adaptive algorithms based on the conjugate gradient (CG) method for distributed networks are presented. Both incremental and diffusion adaptive solutions are considered. Secondly, adaptive link selection algorithms for distributed estimation and their application to wireless sensor networks and smart grids are proposed. Thirdly, a novel distributed compressed estimation scheme is introduced for sparse signals and systems based on compressive sensing techniques. The proposed scheme consists of compression and decompression modules inspired by compressive sensing to perform distributed compressed estimation. A design procedure is also presented and an algorithm is developed to optimize measurement matrices. Lastly, a novel distributed reduced-rank scheme and adaptive algorithms are proposed for distributed estimation in wireless sensor networks and smart grids. The proposed distributed scheme is based on a transformation that performs dimensionality reduction at each agent of the network followed by a reduced–dimension parameter vector.