Resource aware distributed detection and estimation of random events in wireless sensor networks

Official URL: http://192.168.1.20/record=b1301579 (Table of Contents)

In this dissertation, we develop several resource aware approaches for detection and estimation in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Tolerating an acceptable degradation from the best achievable performance, we seek more resource efficient solutions than the state-of-the-art methods. We first define a multi-objective optimization problem and find the trade-off solutions between two conflicting objectives for the distributed detection problem in WSNs: minimizing the probability of error and minimizing the total energy consumption. Simulation results show that Pareto-optimal solutions can provide significant energy savings at the cost a slight increase in the probability of error from its minimum achievable value. Having detected the presence of the source, accurate source localization is another important task to be performed by a WSN. The state-of-the-art one-shot location estimation scheme requires simultaneous transmission of all sensor data to the fusion center. We propose an iterative source localization algorithm where a small set of anchor sensors first detect the presence of the source and arrive at a coarse location estimate. Then a number of non-anchor sensors are selected in an iterative manner to refine the location estimate. The iterative localization scheme reduces the communication requirements as compared to the one-shot location estimation while introducing some estimation latency. For sensor selection at each iteration, two metrics are proposed which are derived based on the mutual information (MI) and the posterior Cramer-Rao lower bound (PCRLB) of the location estimate. In terms of computational complexity, the PCRLB-based sensor selection metric is more efficient as compared to the MI-based sensor selection metric, and under the assumption of perfect communication channels between sensors and the fusion center, both sensor selection schemes achieve the similar estimation performance that is the mean squared error of the source location gets very close to the PCRLB of one-shot location estimator within a few iterations. The proposed iterative method is further extended to the case which considers fading on the channels between sensors and the fusion center. Simulation results are presented for the cases when partial or complete channel knowledge are available at the fusion center. We finally consider a heterogenous sensing field and define a distributed parameter estimation problem where the quantization data rate of a sensor is determined as a function of its observation SNR. The inverse of the average Fisher information is then defined as a lower bound on the average PCRLB which is hard to compute. The inverse of the average Fisher information is minimized subject to the total bandwidth and bandwidth utilization constraints and we find the optimal transmission probability of each possible quantization rate. Under stringent bandwidth availability, the proposed scheme outperforms the scheme where the total bandwidth is equally distributed among sensors.