Single-Transmission Distributed Detection via Order Statistics

Consider a sensor network made of remote nodes connected to a common fusion center. In a recent work, Blum and Sadler proposed the idea of ordered transmissions-sensors with more informative measurements deliver their messages first-and they proved that optimal detection performance can be achieved using only a subset of the measurements available to the system. Taking to one extreme this approach, we show that using only one transmission the detection error can be made as small as desired, provided that the network size n is large enough. Indeed, we design a distributed detection scheme and prove its asymptotic consistency with respect to n, when the decision is made using just one-but the best-out of n collected samples.