Channel aware decentralized detection in wireless sensor networks

Most of the channel aware decentralized detection methods are actually semi-decentralized in the sense that all the peripheral sensors transmit a quantized function of their observations to a central node (fusion center) and the final decision is made there. In this paper, we propose a fully decentralized channel aware algorithm for decentralized detection which is based on gossip. In our method nodes try to reach consensus by communicating only with neighbouring nodes. First, we propose our method where the channels between the nodes are ideal (i.e., no fading or noise) and show that it converges to the same solution as the centralized scheme, and hence it is globally optimum. Then, we modify it for the case of noisy channels with flat fading and show by simulation that our algorithm still converges to the optimum solution.