A Reputation Based Tactical Fusion Approach in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract To address the issues of the coexistence of the noisy signal channels, the vulnerability of sensor nodes and the limited coverage redundancy of monitoring, which is very common in actual application scenarios, a new decision fusion approach for distributed detection in wireless sensor networks is developed in this paper. A reputation weight is given to every sensor node by the fusion center when fusing their local decisions which then is modified according to the global decision to grade the reliability of the sensing nodes. By adopting this approach, the noise in the signal channels and the potential damage of the sensor nodes that may affect the accuracy of the sensing result are taken into account. Meanwhile, by using the reputation strategy, less sensor nodes are required to monitor the region of interest to achieve the accuracy of sensing, which can greatly save the energy consumption of the networks. The advantages of proposed fusion strategy are demonstrated by simulation results.