Optimal Detection and Performance of Distributed Sensor Systems

Global optimization of a distributed sensor detection system withfusion is considered, where the fusion rule and local detectors aresolved to obtain overall optimal performance. This yields coupledequations for the local detectors and the fusion center.The detection performance of the distributed system with fusionis developed. The globally optimal system performance is comparedwith two suboptimal systems. Receiver operating characteristics(ROCs) are computed numerically for the problem of detecting aknown signal embedded in non-Gaussian noise.