Abstract— Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are an invaluable
resource for realizing the vision of the Internet of Things. This
paper investigates the energy minimization problem for the joint
estimation of a noise-corrupted parameter in WSNs, where the
sensors send digital signals to a fusion center via orthogonal
channels. In particular, each sensor chooses a quantization level,
a modulation order, and a transmission bandwidth for its link
to the fusion center with the goal to minimize the total energy
consumption at the sensors. It is shown that this problem can be
approximated as a convex optimization problem and an efficient
iterative algorithm is proposed to compute the near-optimal
solution. Simulation results are provided to validate the analysis