Serial Distributed Detection Performance Analysis in Wireless Sensor Networks under Noisy Channel

In this paper, we consider the performance of serial distributed detection in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) under the assumption that the local decisions made by sensors are transmitted over noisy channels. Different from the parallel fusion, where the local results are directly sent to the fusion center, in serial fusion, local results are transmitted to the fusion center through multi-hop, short-range communications. We derive a fusion decision rule for serial signal detection, which takes the channel noise into account. And the simulation results show that the performance of serial distributed detection is inferior to that of parallel distributed detection, especially when the number of sensors is large. However, serial distributed detection utilizes short-range, multi-hop transmission, so it can be used as an energy-efficient distributed detection scheme for wireless sensor networks.