Transmission Control Policy design for decentralized detection in sensor networks

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) deployed for detection applications has the distinguishing feature that sensors cooperate to perform the detection task. Therefore, the decoupled design approach typically used to design communication networks, where each network layer is designed independently, does not lead to the desired optimal detection performance. Recent work on decentralized detection has addressed the design of MAC and routing protocols for detection applications by considering independently the Quality of Information (QoI), Channel State Information (CSI), and Residual Energy Information (REI) for each sensor. However, little attention has been given to integrate the three quality measures (QoI, CSI, REI) in the complete system design. In this work, we pursue a cross-layer approach to design a QoI, CSI, and REI-aware Transmission Control Policy (TCP) that coordinates communication between local sensors and the fusion center, in order to maximize the detection performance. We formulate and solve a constrained nonlinear optimization problem to find the optimal TCP design variables. We compare our design with the decoupled approach, where each layer is designed separately, in terms of the delay for detection and WSN lifetime.