Energy Efficient Decentralized Detection Based on Bit-optimal Multi-hop Transmission in One-dimensional Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract: Existing information theoretic work in decentralized detection is largely focused on parallel configuration of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), where an individual hard or soft decision is computed at each sensor node and then transmitted directly to the fusion node. Such an approach is not efficient for large networks, where communication structure is likely to comprise of multiple hops. On the other hand, decentralized detection problem investigated for multi-hop networks is mainly concerned with reducing number and/or size of messages by using compression and fusion of information at intermediate nodes. In this paper an energy efficient multi-hop configuration of WSNs is proposed to solve the detection problem in large networks with two objectives: maximizing network lifetime and minimizing probability of error in the fusion node. This optimization problem is considered under the constraint of total consumed energy. The two objectives mentioned are achieved simultaneously in the multi-hop configuration by exploring tradeoffs between different path lengths and number of bits allocated to each node for quantization. Simulation results show significant improvement in the proposed multi-hop configuration compared with the parallel configuration in terms of energy efficiency and detection accuracy for different size networks, especially in larger networks.