Performance Limits and Design of MIMO for Sensor and Ad Hoc Wireless and Networks

摘要

We have made excellent progress on studying appropriate signal processing and communication strategies for networks of dispersed nodes where each node may be equipped with a sensor. One area of focus has been on developing appropriate signal processing and communication strategies for networks which focus on target detection or hypothesis testing problems. There are many important military and non-military applications of this paradyme. In particular, hypothesis testing, often called signal detection, is a fundamental sensor networking application which is key for solving many important problems including improved monitoring, control and repair of the human body, buildings, bridges, energy production facilities, the environment and other critical infrastructure, while also providing important contributions to homeland security, law enforcement, disaster prediction/avoidance and defense related problems. We have developed very promising approaches for saving battery power for important military applications employing sensors. For example, we developed a highly efficient approach which achieves the same performance as the optimum energy unconstrained approach but which saves energy proportional to the number of sensors employed provided the signal to be detected is observed with sufficient signal-to-noise ratio. For such cases, the average number of sensor transmissions saved over the optimum unconstrained energy approach is larger than half the number of sensors employed without any loss in performance.