Reliable localised event detection in a wireless distributed radio telescope

Abstract

We consider a large wireless network constituting a radio telescope. Each of the anticipated 3000 nodes is triggered to collect data for further analysis at a rate of more than 200 Hz, mostly caused by noisy environmental sources. However, relevant cosmic rays occur only a few times a day. As every trigger has an associated 12.5 KB of data, and considering the size of the telescope in number of nodes and covered area, centralised processing is not an option. We propose a fully decentralised event detection algorithm based on collaborative local data analysis, effectively filtering out only those triggers that need further centralised processing. As we show through performance evaluations, the crux in the design is finding the right balance between accuracy and efficient use of resources such as the communication bandwidth in the unreliable communication environment.