• Energy Research

Secrecy is essential for a variety of emerging wireless applications where distributed confidential information is communicated in a multilevel network from sources to destinations. Network secrecy can be accomplished by exploiting the intrinsic properties of multilevel wireless networks (MWN). This paper introduces the concept of distributed network secrecy (DNS) and develops a framework for the design and analysis of secure, reliable, and efficient MWNs. Our framework accounts for node spatial distribution, multilevel cluster formation, propagation medium, communication protocol, and energy consumption. This research provides a foundation for DNS and offers a new perspective on the relationship between DNS and network lifetime.

Decentralized detection in a network of wireless sensor nodes involves the fusion of information about a phenomenon of interest (PoI) from geographically dispersed nodes. In this paper, we investigate the problem of binary decentralized detection in a dense and randomly deployed wireless sensor network (WSN), whereby the communication channels between the nodes and the fusion center are bandwidth-constrained. We consider a scenario in which sensor observations, conditioned on the alternate hypothesis, are independent but not identically distributed across the sensor nodes.We compare two different fusion architectures, namely, the parallel fusion architecture (PFA) and the cooperative fusion architecture (CFA), for such bandwidthconstrained WSNs, where each sensor node is restricted to send a 1-bit information to the fusion center. For each architecture, we derive expression for the probability of decision error at the fusion center. We propose a consensus flooding protocol for CFA and analyze its average energy consumption. We analyze the effects of PoI intensity, realistic link models, consensus flooding protocol, and network connectivity on the system reliability and average energy consumption for both fusion architectures. We demonstrate that a trade-off exists among spatial diversity gain, average energy consumption, delivery ratio of the consensus flooding protocol, network connectivity, node density, and PoI intensity in CFA. We then provide insight into the design of cooperative WSNs.