Adaptive Retransmission for Distributed Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks

An approach combining distributed detection with error-correcting codes has recently been proposed to design a fault-tolerant classification system in wireless sensor networks. The detection result of each sensor must be transmitted to a fusion center for making a final decision. The mis-classification probability using this approach is high when the transmission channel is highly noisy. This work proposes a novel adaptive retransmission algorithm to improve the mis classification probability. The fusion center calculates reliability of each received detection result while making the final decision. When the final decision is not reliable, the sensor which has sent the received result with the lowest reliability will be asked to retransmit its detection result by the fusion center. Simulation results show that the misclassification probability can be effectively reduced through the retransmission