Optimal control of communication in energy constrained sensor networks through team theory and Extended RItz Method

The Extended RItz Method (ERIM) can be used to face optimal decision and control problems when finding the global solution is hard, because the problem is ill-conditioned or we can only compute the solution via numerical approximations. It consists in constraining the control functions to take on a fixed structure with a certain number of free parameters to be optimized. We will show the use of such method for the solution of a communication problem in a mixed (analog/digital) transmission environment. A noisy channel is used to convey information from a limited-energy analog device to a sink; in the presence of a binary link, how can we reduce the energy spent for transmission without renouncing reconstruction capability and real-time encoding?