| In this thesis work we provide new results on the performance of a wireless sensor network in which a finite number of iid sensor nodes transmit their binary decisions, regarding a binary hypothesis, to a fusion center. All the sensors employ on-off keying modulation scheme to transmit their decisions through a single frequency channel. Each link between a sensor and the fusion center is modeled either as a non-fading channel or as an independently fading slow Rayleigh channel. The fusion center employs a non-coherent detector for making the final decision on the hypothesis of interest. In Rayleigh channel, parallel channels carrying the sensors decisions followed by a counting rule at the fusion center and the single channel transmission scheme proposed here are compared. The non-coherent loss incurred due to incoherent reception of signals from the sensors is investigated for different sensor and channel parameters. Moreover this study shows that, for certain parameters, the non-coherent loss due to single channel transmission is not very high and hence the bandwidth saving and the simplicity of having identical single frequency transmitters at the sensors may be advantageous in low-cost wireless sensor networks. |
