Distributed detection with transmit-only sensors and a successive interference cancellation receiver

A low-cost deployment of wireless sensor networks heavily depends on the availability of low-complexity sensor nodes. In this paper, a sensor network with simple transmit-only IR-UWB sensor nodes is analyzed, that is deployed for distributed detection of signals in a region of interest. The nodes transmit their local decisions with a fixed transmission power over non-orthogonal channels to a fusion center, where the received local decisions are combined to a final decision with high reliability. The fusion center is assumed to be equipped with a successive interference cancellation receiver. For this receiver, a novel detection ordering scheme tailored for distributed detection is proposed. Numerical results illustrate that it leads to a significant performance gain in terms of the application-specific performance metric compared to a conventional non application-specific detection order.