Detection of an event and its location in a wireless sensor network

摘要

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which can often be installed quickly and fairly economically, are useful for detecting threats (or events) in a region of interest. As the data received from sensor nodes contain measurement and transmission errors, interpreting the data requires appropriate statistical methods and algorithms. In particular, deciding if an event is present in the network region or not and inferring the location of the event when it is deemed present are two important decision problems. We give a statistical framework for addressing these two problems and frame them as one estimation problem. We present a solution based on the maximum likelihood method and evaluate its performance by simulation. We also describe a Bayesian approach that can be used when relevant prior distribution and loss function are available.