Extracting Target Detection Knowledge Based on Spatiotemporal Information in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been deployed for many applications of target detection, such as intrusion detection and wildlife protection. In these applications, the first step is to detect whether the target is present or not. However, most of the existing work uses the “simple disk model” as signal model, which may not capture the sensing environment. In this work, we utilize a more realistic signal model to describe sensing process of sensors. On the other hand, the “majority rule” is widely used to make the final decision, which may not obtain the true judgment. To this end, we utilize a more realistic signal model and also use a probabilistic decision model to make the final decision. Moreover, we propose a probabilistic detection algorithm in which all sensors' local measurement values are fully used. This algorithm does not need any artificial threshold compared with traditional algorithms. It makes the most of spatiotemporal information to obtain the final decision. For the spatial perspective, sensors are distributed in different locations cooperating with each other. Meanwhile, for the temporal perspective, multiround subdecisions are fused. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by extensive simulation results, which show high detection probabilities and low false alarm probabilities.