Asymptotic Performance of Distributed Detection in Clustered Multi-Hop Wireless Sensor Networks

The authors consider a multi-hop clustered wireless sensor network in which sensor nodes use their observations of the environment to make local hard (0/1) decisions about whether an event has occurred. The local decisions are transmitted over a Binary Symmetric Channel (BSC) to the ClusterHead (CH) in a multi-hop fashion. The CH fuses the local decisions it receives to produce a final hard decision about the event. They investigate the asymptotic performance of the Decision Error Probability (DEP) at the CH for a network with a fixed number of nodes and a randomly deployed network by deriving the error exponents.