Censored Distributed Space-Time Coding for Wireless Sensor Networks

We consider the application of distributed space-time coding in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In particular, sensors use a common noncoherent distributed space-time block code (DSTBC) to forward their local decisions to the fusion center (FC) which makes the final decision. We show that the performance of distributed space-time coding is negatively affected by erroneous sensor decisions caused by observation noise. To overcome this problem of error propagation, we introduce censored distributed space-time coding where only reliable decisions are forwarded to the FC. The optimum noncoherent maximum-likelihood and a low-complexity, suboptimum generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) FC decision rules are derived and the performance of the GLRT decision rule is analyzed. Based on this performance analysis we derive a gradient algorithm for optimization of the local decision/censoring threshold. Numerical and simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed censoring scheme making distributed space-time coding a prime candidate for signaling in WSNs.