In the context of distributed estimation in wireless sensor networks (WSN)
due to transmission power/bandwidth constrains
it is significant to reduce size of transmitted data.In this paper
a distributed estimation scheme
namely
multi-level quantization scheme (MQS) is proposed.The quantization threshold optimization problem is formulated by using asymptotic performance as an optimality criterion.The optimum quantization thresholds are obtained by resorting to particle swarm optimization algorithm.The explicit expression of the Cramr-Rao lower bound is derived.The proposed method is compared with uniform quantization scheme (UQS) and no quantization scheme (NQS).Theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the MQS scheme outperforms the UQS.Moreover
with 3-bit quantization
the MQS can provide estimation performance very close to that of the NQS.