Node failure handling for serial distributed detection in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, serial distributed detection under node failure for wireless sensor networks is studied. All previously suggested distributed detection algorithms for wireless sensor networks assume sensor nodes are completely functional. However, sensor nodes are vulnerable to failure for variety of reasons. Hence, node failure tolerant algorithm design is crucial to provide robustness to system under node failure. We propose new decision fusion algorithms for serial network topology which are more robust to node failure than the conventional algorithms. Numerical experiments suggest that the proposed methods outperform the conventional decision fusion rule under node failure in serial network topology.