Performance of Decentralized Detection in a Resource-constrained Sensor Network with Non-orthogonal Communications

The performance of decentralized detection in a resource-limited wireless sensor network is investigated. The system is assumed to be subjected to a total power constraint and all sensors are assumed to perform analog relay-amplifier local processing. Under these assumptions, we show that, we can monotonically improve the fusion performance by using non-orthogonal sensor-to-fusion center communication, as opposed to orthogonal communications. In order to quantify the performance, we employ circulant matrix theory to derive closed-form asymptotic expressions. These asymptotic results allow us to observe the effect of each parameter on the total system performance. Numerical results show that these asymptotics provide a very good approximation to the exact performance, even for a small number of sensors