Optimal Detector Based on Data Fusion for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper investigates target detection problem in wireless sensor networks. Sensors carry out sensing operations and make consensus decisions about the presence or absence of a target or event. Most of previous studies for target detection either assume an unrealistic disk model for making detection decision or provide complicated numerical methods to evaluate detection performance. This paper develops the Uniformly Most Powerful(UMP) detector based on likelihood ratio test and derives simple and elegant test rules for target presence and absence. Moreover, detection performance measured by missing rate is also derived analytically. Simulations are conducted to show the performance of the UMP detector compared to a detector developed previously based on value fusion. The results show that the proposed detector dramatically outperforms the value fusion detector even in vulnerable locations.