To cooperate or not to cooperate: detection strategies in sensor networks

This paper is an initial investigation into the following question: can cooperation among sensors in a sensor network improve detection performance in a simple hypothesis test? We analyze a simple cooperative system using the Kullback-Leibler (KL) discrimination distance and a quantity known as the information transfer ratio which is a ratio of KL distances. We discover that, asymptotically, gain over a non-cooperative system depends on the conditional KL distance. We conclude with an illustrative example which demonstrates that cooperation not only significantly improves performance but can also degrade it.