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- Title
- Optimal Detection for a Distributed
Transmission Array.
- Authors
- A. Hu, S. D. Servetto.
- Status
- In the Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Information
Theory (ISIT), Yokohama, Japan, June-July 2003.
- Abstract
-
We consider the problem of communication over the reachback channel:
this is a channel that arises in the context of wireless sensor networks,
where multiple cheap and unreliable nodes pick up correlated samples of
some spatial stochastic process, and then they need to communicate their
observations back to a remote receiver. In this paper we consider the
problem of designing a suitable transmitter for reachback. We assume
that all the nodes agree on a common bit of information to send, and
that all the sensor nodes cooperate to generate an aggregate signal that
can reliably detected at a far location (even though, in general, the
individual signals generated by each node cannot). An important challenge
that we face is the fact that, with a large number of cheap and unreliable
transmitters, it seems unlikely that these transmitters will be able
to achieve high precision to synchronize their transmissions in the
cooperative transmission step. We show in this paper how the problem
of detecting signals generated with unreliable clocks is equivalent to
detecting signals that undergo multipath fading, and use this equivalence
to derive optimal detection structures for the signals generated by our
distributed transmission array.
Download PDF file of abstract in proceedings (1 page).