Exploiting Local and Cloud Sensor Fusion in Intermittently Connected Sensor Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes a hybrid sensor network architecture combining local clustering and intermittent cloud communication to improve event detection accuracy despite noisy sensors and limited connectivity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel cloud-cluster fusion scheme and provides an optimized decision rule leveraging concentration inequalities for enhanced detection performance.

Findings

Clustering improves resilience to sensor noise at low cloud communication.

Larger clusters significantly boost detection accuracy even with infrequent cloud links.

The hybrid scheme outperforms traditional methods in intermittent connectivity scenarios.

Abstract

We consider a detection problem where sensors experience noisy measurements and intermittent communication opportunities to a centralized fusion center (or cloud). The objective of the problem is to arrive at the correct estimate of event detection in the environment. The sensors may communicate locally with other sensors (local clusters) where they fuse their noisy sensor data to estimate the detection of an event locally. In addition, each sensor cluster can intermittently communicate to the cloud, where a centralized fusion center fuses estimates from all sensor clusters to make a final determination regarding the occurrence of the event across the deployment area. We refer to this hybrid communication scheme as a cloud-cluster architecture. Minimizing the expected loss function of networks where noisy sensors are intermittently connected to the cloud, as in our hybrid communication scheme, has not been investigated to our knowledge. We leverage recently improved concentration inequalities to arrive at an optimized decision rule for each cluster and we analyze the expected detection performance resulting from our hybrid scheme. Our analysis shows that clustering the sensors provides resilience to noise in the case of low communication probability with the cloud. For larger clusters, a steep improvement in detection performance is possible even for a low communication probability by using our cloud-cluster architecture.