Low-complexity schemes for digital encoding of a noise-corrupted signal and associated signal estimators are presented. This problem arises in wireless distributed sensor networks where an environmental signal of interest is to be estimated at a central site from low-bandwidth digitized information received from collections of remote sensors. We show that the use of a properly designed and often easily implemented additive control input before signal quantization can significantly enhance overall system performance. In particular, efficient estimators can be constructed and used with optimized pseudo-noise, deterministic, and feedback-based control inputs, resulting in a hierarchy of practical systems with very attractive performance-complexity characteristics.