Plackett fusion of correlated decisions

Abstract

In a wireless sensor network (WSN), nodes usually send their processed data (their decisions, in the extreme case) to a fusion center (FC) which takes the final decision by applying an appropriate fusion rule on received decisions. The decisions of nodes are generally correlated. However, complicated fusion rules should be implemented if the correlation is considered, even in the simplest case of a two-sensor network. In this paper, a decision fusion scheme based on the Plackett copula is proposed in which the correlation among nodes is considered. The simulation results show that the proposed Plackett fusion (PF) scheme improves appropriately the detection performance in a serial network.