Collaborative Wireless Sensor Networks for Target Detection Based on the Generalized Approach to Signal Processing

Collaboration in wireless sensor networks must be fault-tolerant due to the harsh environmental conditions in which such networks can be deployed. This paper focuses on finding signal processing algorithms for collaborative target detection based on the generalized approach to signal processing in the presence of noise that are efficient in terms of communication cost, precision, accuracy, and number of faulty sensors tolerable in the wireless sensor network. Two algorithms, namely, value fusion and decision fusion constructed according to the generalized approach to signal processing in the presence of noise, are identified first. When comparing their performance and communication overhead, decision fusion is found to become superior to value fusion as the ratio of faulty sensors to fault free sensors increases. The use of the generalized approach to signal processing in the presence of noise under designing value and decision fusion algorithms in wireless sensor networks allows us to obtain the same performance, but at low values of signal energy, as under the employment of universally adopted signal processing algorithms widely used in practice.