Performance guarantees in sensor networks

Sensor networks for monitoring distributed spatial phenomena has emerged as an area of significant practical interest. In this paper we investigate fundamental issues in detection of spatially distributed phenomena under communication constraints. The novelty of the paper is in providing a tradeoff between global performance and costs involved in communication. In particular we focus our attention on boundary estimation and develop a framework to optimize communication costs subject to worst-case misclassification guarantees. It is shown that the communication cost is primarily a function of two parameters-1) length of the boundary 2) Overall mis-classification error-which leads us to the conclusion that wireless sensor network performance is comparable to that obtained with a wired network of sensors.