Restoring CFAR Validity for Single-Channel IoT Sensor Streams: A Monte Carlo Comparison of Five Detectors under Cortex-M0+ Constraints

TL;DR

This paper compares five event detection algorithms for IoT sensor streams on Cortex-M0+ devices, demonstrating that TSNFA outperforms classical methods by achieving high detection accuracy, precision, and low bandwidth usage.

Contribution

It introduces a Monte Carlo evaluation of TSNFA against classical CFAR-based detectors in IoT constraints, highlighting TSNFA's superior combined performance.

Findings

TSNFA achieves 99.97-100% detection rate with 100% precision and zero false positives.

Classical detectors maintain high detection but have low precision or high bandwidth.

CUSUM's detection rate drops significantly at lower SNR levels.

Abstract

Real-time event detection in IoT mesh sensor networks must balance sensitivity against false-positive load on a constrained mesh radio. We present a Monte Carlo comparison of the Temporal Spectral Noise-Floor Adaptation (TSNFA) detector against four classical comparators drawn from the radar Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) family and from sequential change detection: the Lipski FFT energy detector, Cell-Averaging CFAR (CA-CFAR), Ordered-Statistic CFAR (OS-CFAR), and state-machine Cumulative Sum (CUSUM). All five detectors are implemented to fit a Cortex-M0+ class envelope, process a 1-D 100 Hz time series in 128-sample frames, and use temporal reference windows in place of the spatial reference cells of conventional radar CFAR. Across a factorial set of four configurations (10 and 50 nodes; 12 dB and 18 dB SNR), each replicated five times over 24 hours, TSNFA achieves 99.97 to 100% event detection rate with 100% event precision and zero false-positive clusters per node. The classical comparators each succeed on one quality dimension and fail on another. Lipski FFT (k = 3), CA-CFAR, and OS-CFAR all maintain near-perfect detection rate but with event precision below 3% and per-node bandwidth between 145 kB/h and 1.2 MB/h. CA-CFAR and OS-CFAR are indistinguishable in false-alarm performance, both saturating the same broadband-statistic failure mode. CUSUM shows an SNR-dependent detection-rate drop from about 70% at 18 dB to 51% at 12 dB. TSNFA is the only algorithm tested that simultaneously achieves high detection rate, high precision, and low per-node bandwidth.