Distributed detection of 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. The focus is on applications where the observations consist of a weak common 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 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 can be shown to be due to the distributed sensors attempting to approximate the correlation terms found in the corresponding centralized tests