Joint data and connection topology recovery in collaborative wireless sensor networks

This work considers a collaborative wireless sensor network where nodes locally exchange coded informative data before transmitting the combined data towards a remote fusion center equipped with an antenna array. For this communication scenario, a new blind estimation algorithm is developed for jointly recovering network transmitted data and connection topology at the fusion center. The proposed algorithm is based on a two-stage approach. The first stage is concerned with the estimation of the channel gains linking the nodes to the fusion center antennas. The second stage performs a joint estimation of network data and connection topology matrices by exploiting a constrained (PARALIND) tensor model for the collected data at the fusion center. Illustrative simulation results evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm for some system configurations and network topologies.