Interactive Distributed Detection: Architecture and Performance Analysis

This paper studies the impact of interactive fusion on detection performance in tandem fusion networks with conditionally independent observations. Within the Neyman-Pearson framework, two distinct regimes are considered: the fixed sample size test and the large sample test. For the former, it is established that interactive distributed detection may strictly outperform the one-way tandem fusion structure. However, for the large sample regime, it is shown that interactive fusion has no improvement on the asymptotic performance characterized by the Kullback-Leibler (KL) distance compared with the simple one-way tandem fusion. The results are then extended to interactive fusion systems where the fusion center and the sensor may undergo multiple steps of memoryless interactions or that involve multiple peripheral sensors, as well as to interactive fusion with soft sensor outputs.