Distributed detection in practical wireless sensor networks via a two-step consensus algorithm

The problem of fully distributed detection of an unknown deterministic signal observed by a wireless sensor network (WSN) is addressed. We propose a two-step distributed consensus-based detection algorithm where in the first step the sensor nodes (SNs) collaborate with their neighbors through error-free, orthogonal channels (the SNs exchange quantized information matched to the channel capacity of each link). In the second step, local 1-bit decisions generated in the first step are shared among neighbors to yield a consensus. Simulations show that our proposed quantized two-step distributed detection algorithm approaches the performance of the unquantized centralized (fusion center) detector.