Distributed detection of weak dependent narrowband signals

Distributed signal detection schemes have received significant attention but most research has focused on cases with independent observations at the different sensors. Cases with dependent narrowband signals, which are of practical interest in communication, radar, and sonar problems, are studied here. The focus is on cases with two sensors where the observations consist of a weak random signal in possibly non-Gaussian additive noise which is independent from sensor to sensor. The author finds that the best (locally optimum) sensor test statistics for such cases are often different from the best test statistics for cases with isolated sensors and that these sensor test statistics may be nonsymmetric even for highly symmetric problems. The possible difference between the best weak-signal distributed sensor test statistic and the best weak-signal test statistic for an isolated sensor is due to the distributed scheme attempting to approximate the correlation terms found in the corresponding two-sensor centralized test.<>