Fast Multilevel Quantization for Distributed Detection Based on Gaussian Approximation

An iterative algorithm is derived for multilevel quantization of sensor observations in distributed sensor networks, where each sensor transmits a summary of its observation to the fusion center and the fusion center makes the final decision. The proposed scheme is composed of a person-by-person optimum quantization at each sensor and a Gaussian approximation to the distribution of the test statistic at the fusion center. The complexity of the algorithm is linear both for identically and non-identically distributed independent sensors. Experimental results indicate that the proposed scheme is promising in comparison to the current state-of-the-art.