Decentralized detection with energy-aware greedy selective sensors

The decentralized detection of events is a primary task in many applications of wireless sensor networks. Since energy consumption is the main constraint in networks of battery-powered sensors, as it limits their lifetime, taking explicitly into account the energy costs in the design of any decentralized detection algorithm becomes a major issue. Based on state-of-the-art censoring techniques and a selective communications framework we develop an energy-aware decentralized detection scheme that, in a greedy fashion, makes an efficient use of the energy resources of a detection network during its lifetime. Simulated scenarios with different number of nodes, consumption patterns and signal models have shown the high gain of our scheme over the uncensored ones in the network lifetime-detection accuracy compromise.