Distributed detection and localization of events in large ad hoc wireless sensor networks

Abstract—We consider the problem of event detection in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that are large in the sense that an event affects the statistics of the observations of a small number of sensors in the vicinity of where it occurs. An event occurs at a random time at a random location in the region (called the region of interest, ROI) covered by the WSN. We consider a distance based sensing model in which the physical signal sensed by a sensor at a distance d from the event is attenuated by a factor ρ(d). We formulate the problem of detecting an event as early as possible and locating it to a subregion of the ROI under the constraints that the average time to false alarm (TFA) and the average time to false isolation (TFI) are bounded by γ. This formulation is motivated by the change detection/isolation framework introduced by Nikiforov [6]. We extend the decentralized detection procedures MAX [11