Topics in Decentralized Detection
Venugopal V. Veeravalli · 1992
In this thesis we obtain several new results in the areas of decentralized sequential detec-tion and robust decentralized detection. In the area of decentralized sequential detection, we first consider the case in which each sensor performs a sequential test on its observations and arrives at a local decision about the true hypothesis; subsequently, the local decisions of all of the sensors are used for a common purpose. Here we assume that decision errors at the sensors are penalized through a common cost function and that each time step taken by the detectors as a team is assigned a positive cost. We show that optimal sensor decision functions can be found in the class of generalized sequential probability ratio tests with monotonically convergent thresholds. We present a technique for obtaining optimal thresholds. We also consider the case in which each sensor sends a sequence of summary messages to a fusion center in which a sequential test is carried out to determine the true hypothesis. Here we assume that decision errors at the fusion center are penalized through a cost function and that each time step taken to arrive at the final decision costs a positive amount. We show that the problem is tractable when the information structure in the system is quasiclassical. In