Decentralized detection in sensor network architectures with feedback

• Main Authors: Tsitsiklis, John N. (Contributor), Zoumpoulis, Spyridon Ilias (Contributor), Kreidl, Olivier Patrick (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2012-07-16T20:33:01Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

 We study a decentralized detection architecture in which each of a set of sensors transmits a highly compressed summary of its observations (a binary message) to a fusion center, which then decides on one of two alternative hypotheses. In contrast to the star (or "parallel") architecture considered in most of the literature, we allow a subset of the sensors to both transmit their messages to the fusion center and to also broadcast them to the remaining sensors. We focus on the following architectural question: is there a significant performance improvement when we allow such a message broadcast? We consider the error exponent (asymptotically, in the limit of a large number of sensors) for the Neyman-Pearson formulation of the detection problem. We prove that the sharing of messages does not improve the optimal error exponent.