Cooperative Detection and Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks

We define information theoretic problems in the cooperative detection of targets by a distributed wireless sensor network, and in the cooperative transmission of the results to a remote user. The dominant constraint in both cases is the energy cost of communications, rather than bandwidth or signal processing costs. We show that the detection problem can be cast as a rate distortion problem, and bound the region for Gaussian sources. We describe how the cooperative transmission problem differs from the usual context for space-time codes, and present one practical approach.