1. A wireless node, comprising: a negotiation module to dynamically negotiate a distinguished node status with other nodes in a wireless network to designate a particular distinguished node among the nodes in the network; a receiver to receive sensol3, data from other nodes in the wireless network when the wireless node is the particular node in the network having the distinguished node status; an estimation module to generate at least one estimate from the sensory data received from the other nodes in the network by exploiting correlation in the sensory data from different nodes that arises from statistical dependency between various samples of data in the sensor, data; a data compressor to compress sensory data using the estimate as an input to a compression process; and a transmitter to send compressed sensory data to a processing station; wherein the dynamic negotiation of the distinguished node status is based on power available in at least some of the nodes in the wireless network.