Distributed estimation using multi-hop adaptive diffusion in sparse wireless sensor networks

The diffusion cooperative scheme is conventionally used in wireless sensor networks for distributed parameter estimation. Each sensor node has the local computing ability and share information with the predefined one hop neighbors for local diffusion. The performance of the diffusion method depends on the degree of the sensor nodes and which is less for a sparse sensor network, especially for the sensor nodes lying on the edge of the network. Therefore, multi-hop diffusion cooperation is proposed here to improve the estimation accuracy and convergent speed. Here, a sensor node receives information from multi-hop (used two-hop) sensor nodes unlike aggregating from immediate neighbors in the conventional diffusion algorithm. The simulation results show the performance improvement of the proposed scheme over the existing diffusion method.