Collaborative Event Region Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks Using Markov Random Fields

Research on event region detection problems in wireless sensor networks (WSN) has received a great amount of interest recently. In these problems, sensor networks are asked to determine where the regions or boundaries in the environment. Each sensor could have its observation coming from its own hypothesis. Sensor nodes in WSN could have different true hypotheses. In this paper, the design of fusion rule when the sensor nodes observe different phenomenon is considered. Based on the Markov random fields (MRF) model and a new sensor fusion technique, we propose a MRF sensor fusion algorithm that can resolve the problem under consideration. The MRF is used to model the spatial correlation, and the sensor fusion technique considers the concept of sensor reliability. Some important issues in WSN, such as channel transmission errors and possible sensor faults are also considered in this paper. By numerical simulations, we have shown that the proposed MRF sensor fusion algorithm can result in a good detection performance