Extremum Encoding for Joint Baseband Signal Compression and Time-Delay Estimation for Distributed Systems

The ubiquitous time-delay estimation (TDE) problem becomes nontrivial when sensors are non-co-located and communication between them is limited. Building on the recently proposed "extremum encoding" compression-estimation scheme, we address the critical extension to complex-valued signals, suitable for radio-frequency (RF) baseband processing. This extension introduces new challenges, e.g., due to unknown phase of the signal of interest and random phase of the noise, rendering a na"ive application of the original scheme inapplicable and irrelevant. In the face of these challenges, we propose a judiciously adapted, though natural, extension of the scheme, paving its way to RF applications. While our extension leads to a different statistical analysis, including extremes of non-Gaussian distributions, we show that, ultimately, its asymptotic behavior is akin to the original scheme. We derive an exponentially tight upper bound on its error probability, corroborate our results via simulation experiments, and demonstrate the superior performance compared to two benchmark approaches.