Receiver Design Principles for Estimation over Fading Channels

In this paper we consider estimation of dynam- ical systems over wireless communication channels. We show that the communication protocols suitable for non real-time applications like data networks may not be entirely applicable for estimation and control of a rapidly changing dynamical system. We then develop new design paradigms for these applications to show how noisy packets should be handled in the receiver. We prove that, in the presence of a cross- layer feedback, keeping all the packets will both maximize the stability range and minimize the estimation error variance. In the absence of such a feedback, we show that keeping all the packets still maximizes the stability range, independent of the shape of the communication noise profile. In order to optimize the performance, in the absence of a cross-layer feedback, we prove that packet drop should be designed to balance information loss and communication noise.