Sigma-Delta ADC Based Distributed Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks

In the existing works on distributed detection in sensor networks, local sensor nodes either quantize the observation or directly scale the analog observation and then transmit the processed information independently over wireless channels to a fusion center. In this paper, we exploit the advantages of both of these two approaches by constructing an equivalent Sigma-Delta ADC across space over wireless sensor networks. Sensors are arranged in a mixing of parallel and serial topologies, enabling each sensor to transmit binary information to the fusion center, while in the meantime preserving the analog information through collaborative processing. Comparison with existing approaches demonstrates the superiority of our proposed scheme in both AWGN and fading channels in terms of the resulting detection error probability.