Asymptotic Performance of Distributed Detection in Clustered Multi-Hop Wireless Sensor Networks

We consider a multi-hop clustered wireless sensor network in which sensor nodes use their observations of the environment to make local hard (0/1) decisions about whether an event has occurred. The local decisions are transmitted over a binary symmetric channel (BSC) to the cluster head (CH) in a multi-hop fashion. The CH fuses the local decisions it receives to produce a final hard decision about the event. We investigate the asymptotic performance of the decision error probability (DEP) at the CH for a network with a fixed number of nodes and a randomly deployed network by deriving the error exponents. We analyze the performance improvement in the DEP and the error exponents when extra rings are added to the clustered network and show the effect of increasing the dimension of the network.