Ordering for energy efficient communications for noncoherent MIMO radar networks

In order to reduce the number of transmissions between a set of sensors and a fusion center in signal detection applications, we propose an algorithm based on ordering and halting the transmissions wisely, which can reduce the data transmission, and thus expended energy and data rate, without sacrificing signal detection performance. Here we consider the specific case of noncoherent signal detection, where the log-likelihood ratio turns out to be nonnegative, with independent observations form sensor to sensor. For this specific case, we design a new ordering algorithm which provides very large savings for some example MIMO radar systems considered for almost all false alarm probabilities and signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). While these savings are demonstrated numerically, we also prove analytically that savings of (N - 1)/N × 100% are achieved for sufficiently small or large false alarm probabilities and sufficiently large distance measures, a generalization of SNR, for a very large class of signal detection problems which employ N total sensors.