Multisensor collaboration in wireless sensor networks for detection of spatially correlated signals

This paper addresses multisensor collaboration for the detection of weak and noisy signals using a network of wireless sensors. We propose a scheme that is designed to detect spatially correlated signals, which is common in many sensor network applications. The proposed scheme allows sensor nodes to automatically form collaborative teams to combine multisensor information for efficient detection of target signals. It applies a clustering measure for multisensor decision fusion that improves the detection performance over traditional schemes that use a counting rule. Associated communication protocols to perform multisensor collaboration, data aggregation and fusion are presented. These protocols are designed to optimise the communication cost in the network while maintaining low probabilities of error for collaborative detection. Performance evaluations of the proposed schemes, obtained using extensive computer simulations, are presented.