A low-interference decision-gathering scheme for critical event detection in clustered wireless sensor network

This paper presents a new decision-gathering scheme that aims at detecting a critical event in an Area of Interests (AoI), where a wireless sensor network is deployed in a group of clusters. The proposed scheme assigns a single time slot for each cluster, where all cluster members simultaneously report their binary decisions to the cluster head on that time slot. As the cluster head is interested in the sum of the binary decisions (not the exact binary decisions), the performance loss due to the concurrent transmission is insignificant compared to the co-channel interference induced from other clusters based on conventional schemes. The main advantage of the proposed scheme is that it avoids the co-channel interference between different clusters and assures minimal delay in detecting the critical event, which is very crucial in many security related applications and scenarios. Both simulation and mathematical analysis of the overall decision-error probability of the proposed scheme are carried out, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.