Privacy-preserving distributed precoder design for decentralized estimation

Abstract

We study privacy-preserving precoder design for decentralized estimation in wireless sensor networks where the sensor nodes want their local information such as the channel state information, observation matrices, and observation covariance matrices to be private. We propose a distributed algorithm with closed form expressions to design the precoders and fusion rule that minimize the estimation error by exchanging messages which do not reveal the local information. We derive the privacy limits offered by the proposed algorithm and prove that the algorithm is privacy-preserving. Simulation results illustrate the trade-off between privacy and estimation accuracy of the proposed algorithm.