Detection of a non-cooperative transmitter in Rayleigh fading with binary observations

The problem of distributed detection of a noncooperative target with non-coherent binary observations is considered. The propagation is assumed to be inversely proportional to a power of the distance from the target and the signal is assumed to be subject to Rayleigh fading and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). As the location and power of the target are unknown, the probability of detection and probability of false alarm are also not known for each individual detectors. Thus, the optimum Chair-Varshney fusion rule does not apply. Instead, a two stage method based on a generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) is derived and proposed. Monte Carlo simulations have been performed to evaluate the performance of the global fusion rule. The results show that the performance of this fusion scheme is significantly better than the intuitive counting rule.