Download or read book Contributions to Distributed Detection and Estimation Over Sensor Networks written by Gene Whipps and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wireless sensor networks have matured over the last several years from popular research and development platforms to commercially-available sensors and systems. In many applications, wireless sensor networks have size, weight, power, and cost limitations. These constraints directly affect the ability of sensor nodes to adequately process and reliably communicate information within the sensor network. This dissertation examines aspects of distributed detection and estimation over a sensor network while considering limitations inherent in wireless networks. First, we consider the problem of distributed detection from a large network of sensors and introduce a realistic network model. Sensor nodes make individual decisions from their local observation and then communicate these decisions through a shared and imperfect communications channel to a central decision node. The key difference from previous research is the network model allows the decision rule to leverage errors in the channel to improve detection performance. We derive analytical expressions that characterize the detection performance of the system with respect to both sensor density and communications delay. We show that the detection performance improves with network density when sensor nodes are appropriately censored and desensitized, despite increasing message collisions. In addition, we show that detection performance using the protocol model, with imperfect communications, rapidly converges to the perfect communications case as the number of communication slots increase.