Cross-layer design for decentralized detection in WSNs

Abstract

A wireless sensor network (WSN) deployed for detection applications has the distinguishing feature that the sensors cooperate to perform the detection task. Therefore, the decoupled and maximum throughput design approaches typically used to design communication networks do not lead to the desired optimal detection performance. Recent work on decentralized detection has addressed the design of media access control (MAC) and routing protocols for detection applications by considering independently the quality of information (QoI), channel state information (CSI), and residual energy information (REI) for each sensor. However, little attention has been given to integrate the three quality measures (QoI, CSI, and REI) in the system design. In this work, we present a cross-layer approach to design a QoI, CSI, and REI-aware transmission control policy (XCP) that coordinates communication between local sensors and the fusion center, in order to maximize the detection performance. We formulate and solve a constrained non-linear optimization problem to find the optimal XCP design variables, for both ALOHA and time-division multiple access (TDMA) sensor networks. We show the detection performance gain compared to the typical decoupled and maximum throughput design approaches, without utilizing additional network resources. We compare ALOHA and TDMA MAC schemes and show the conditions under which each transmission scheme outperforms. © 2014 Tantawy et al.; licensee Springer.