Maximum average entropy-based quantization of local observations for distributed detection

Abstract

In a wireless sensor network, multilevel quantization is necessary to find a compromise between minimizing the power consumption of sensors and maximizing the detection performance at the fusion center (FC). The previous methods have been using distance measures such as J-divergence and Bhattacharyya distance in this quantization. This work proposes a different approach based on the maximum average entropy of the output of the sensors under both hypotheses and utilizes it in a Neyman-Pearson criterion-based distributed detection scheme to detect a point source. The receiver operating characteristics of the proposed maximum average entropy (MAE) method in quantizing sensor outputs have been evaluated for multilevel quantization both when the sensor outputs are available error-free at the FC and when non-coherent M-ary frequency shift keying communication is used for transmitting MAE based multilevel quantized sensor outputs over a Rayleigh fading channel. The simulation studies show the success of the MAE in the cases of both error-free fusion and where the effect of the wireless channel has been incorporated. As expected, the performance improves as the level of quantization increases and with six-level quantization approaches the performance of non-quantized data transmission.