A New Hybrid Approach for Detection and Estimation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor network is a network that contains a set of autonomous inexpensive devices called sensors. These sensors communicate together to detect, track, and monitor physical environments. Since energy is the scarcest resource in wireless sensor networks, some necessary improvements should be made to current detection algorithms to reduce the amount of consumed energy.In this paper, two detection algorithms are studied named value fusion algorithm and decision fusion algorithm. Hybrid approach was developed as combinations between these two algorithms. In hybrid approach, event region was divided into a number of clusters. In each cluster, a cluster head is selected. Only one cluster is activated and participated in the detection process. Members of the active cluster perform the value fusion algorithm locally and the cluster head (CH) performs the decision fusion algorithm globally.To implement the hybrid approach, hybrid value-decision (HVD) clustering protocol was developed as an extension to LEACH protocol.The results show that the hybrid algorithm is superior to value and decision algorithms in terms of energy consumption when more sensors are deployed in the event region (i.e. more scalable event region).