Information Sciences: an International Journal
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Real-time detection is an important requirement of many mission-critical wireless sensor network applications such as battlefield monitoring and security surveillance. Due to the high network deployment cost, it is crucial to understand and predict the real-time detection capability of a sensor network. However, most existing real-time analyses are based on overly simplistic sensing models (e.g., the disc model) that do not capture the stochastic nature of detection. In practice, data fusion has been adopted in a number of sensor systems to deal with sensing uncertainty and enable efficient collaboration among resource-limited sensors. However, real-time performance analysis of sensor networks designed based on data fusion has received little attention. In this paper, we bridge this gap by investigating the fundamental real-time detection performance of large-scale sensor networks under stochastic sensing models. In particular, we consider two basic data fusion schemes, i.e., value fusion and decision fusion. Our results show that data fusion is effective in achieving stringent performance requirements such as short detection delay and low false alarm rates. Moreover, value fusion and decision fusion are suitable for low and high signal-to-noise ratio scenarios, respectively. Our results help understand the impact of data fusion and provide important guidelines for the design of real-time wireless sensor networks for intrusion detection. Our analyses are verified through extensive simulations based on both synthetic data sets and data traces collected in a real deployment for vehicle detection. The results show that data fusion can reduce the network density by about 60 percent compared with the disc model while detecting any intruder within one detection period at a false alarm rate lower than five percent.