Distributed binary quantizers for communication constrained large-scale sensor networks

We consider in this paper local sensor quantizer design for large-scale bandwidth and/or energy constrained wireless sensor networks (WSNs) operating in fading channels. In particular, under the Neyman-Pearson framework, we address the design of binary local sensor quantizers for a binary hypothesis problem in the asymptotic regime where the number of sensors is large. Motivated by the sensor censoring idea for reduced communication rate, each sensor either transmits '1' to a fusion center or remains silent. By adopting energy detector as the fusion rule, we develop a procedure to obtain local sensor threshold that maximizes the Kullback-Leibler distance of the distributions of the fusion statistic under the two hypotheses. The proposed quantizerdesign is well suited for the emerging large scale resource-constrained WSNs applications. Numerical results based on Gaussian and exponential observations are presented to demonstrate the design procedure.