Adaptive Power Allocation in Wireless Sensor Networks with Spatially Correlated Data and Analog Modulation: Perfect and Imperfect CSI

We address the problem of power allocation in a wireless sensor network where distributed sensors amplify and forward their partial and noisy observations of a Gaussian random source to a remote fusion center (FC). The FC reconstructs the source based on linear minimum mean-squared error (LMMSE) estimation rule. Motivated by the availability of limited energy in the sensor networks, we undertake the design of power allocation based on minimization of the reconstruction distortion subject to a constraint on the network transmit power. The design is based on the following two cases: (i) exact knowledge of the channel gains and (ii) the estimates of the channel gains. We show that the distortion can be represented as a convex function of the transmit powers of the sensors. Moreover, we show that the power allocation based on this distortion function does not bear any closed form solution. To this end, we propose a novel design based on the successive approximation of the LMMSE distortion, which turns out to be simple, computationally efficient, and exhibits excellent convergence properties. The simulation examples illustrate that the proposed design holds considerable performance gain compared to a uniform power allocation scheme