Splitting Tree Algorithm for Decentralized Detection in Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose a novel collision resolution scheme for random access in wireless sensor networks. If a collision incurs during fusion process, splitting algorithm is applied to resolve the collision dynamically and recursively, based on past channel states alone or channel states and sensing information together. The novelty of our splitting algorithm is two-fold: 1. we perform splitting based on the informativeness of sensor data, ensuring that more informative data will be collected first; 2. we optimize splitting intervals based on local summaries of sensors collected at each fusion step. As shown in our simulation results, the proposed schemes achieve significant channel and power efficiency gain, compared with fixed sample size test, traditional sequential probability ratio test, and Pseudo-Bayesian based contention protocol.