Cooperative OFDM for semi distributed detection in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, parallel distributed detection in wireless sensor network (WSN) is investigated. Sensors are assumed to be transmitting their local decisions to a fusion center through a wireless fading channel using cooperative transmission. To enable cooperative transmission, sensors are divided into groups where sensors in each group help each other in transmitting their decisions in a way that the fusion center receives each local decision as an orthogonal frequency division multiplexed (OFDM) block. The fusion center detects all OFDM blocks sent by all groups to process them in order to obtain a final (global) decision. Using this cooperative transmission scheme enables the fusion center to apply diversity combining methods in order to reduce the fading effects of the channel. Optimal and sub-optimal fusion rules are derived for such system. Simulation results are provided to show the performance improvement that can be obtained compared to the conventional system where each local decision is transmitted to the fusion center individually and no diversity technique is applied at the fusion center.