Collaborative sequential-based detection in wireless sensor networks

Due to limited power resources, energy efficiency is an important aspect of detection in wireless sensor networks. We propose a collaborative detection scheme, based on sequential hypothesis testing, where a randomly chosen node may initiate a collaboration, collecting observations from neighboring nodes to test the hypotheses. Our simulation results show that for large networks and high SNR, the proposed scheme leads to lower communication cost and similar performance when compared to a standard detection setup, where all the observations are collected in a fusion node. We also examine how the energy efficiency of this scheme evolves as a function of the network structure.