1. A distributed speech recognition system, comprising: a noise floor estimator to provide a noise floor estimate to a feature extractor, wherein the feature extractor provides a parametric representation of the noise floor estimate; an encoder to encode the parametric representation of the noise floor estimate and to generate an encoded parametric representation of the noise floor estimate; a front-end controller to determine when at least one of the noise floor estimator, the feature extractor, and the encoder is to be turned on or off and to determine when the noise floor estimator is to provide the noise floor estimate to the feature extractor; a decoder to decode the encoded parametric representation of the noise floor estimate and to generate a decoded parametric representation of the noise floor estimate; and a noise model generator to create a statistical model of noise feature vectors based on the decoded parametric representation of the noise floor estimate.