On distributed detection with correlated sensors: two examples

The authors study the effect of correlated noise on the performance of a distributed detection system. They consider a suboptimal scheme by assuming that the local sensors have the same operating point, and that the distribution of the sensor observation is symmetric. This implies that the joint distribution of the sensor decisions, and therefore the fusion rule, are symmetric functions of the sensor decisions. The detection of a known signal in additive Gaussian noise and in Laplacian noise are considered. In both cases, system performance deteriorates when the correlation between the sensor noises is positive and increasing, whereas the performance improves considerably when the correlation is negative and increasing in magnitude