Efficient distributed estimation based on non-regular quantized data

We consider parameter estimation in distributed systems in which measurements at local nodes are quantized in a non-regular manner, where multiple codewords are mapped into a single local measurement. For the system with non-regular quantization, to ensure a perfect independent encoding at local nodes, a local measurement can be encoded into a set of a great number of codewords which are transmitted to a fusion node where estimation is conducted with enormous computational cost due to the large cardinality of the sets. In this paper, we propose an efficient estimation technique that can handle the non-regular quantized data by efficiently finding the feasible combination of codewords without searching all of the possible combinations. We conduct experiments to show that the proposed estimation performs well with respect to previous novel techniques with a reasonable complexity.