Serial distributed detection for wireless sensor networks

Serial distributed detection for wireless sensor networks is studied in this paper. Unlike the traditional serial distributed detection schemes where it is assumed that the sensor decision at one stage is known exactly to the subsequent sensor node, we assume that the links between the consecutive sensor nodes are subject to fading and additive noise resulting in corruption of the transmitted decisions. Incorporating the effect of fading in the detection process, a decision fusion rule based on likelihood ratio tests is derived. Optimality of likelihood ratio test is also investigated. By numerical examples, we illustrate the performance of the proposed serial detection scheme and compare it with that of the parallel distributed detection.