The authors define the probability of receiving correct decisions from all the clusters by the data fusion centre as the reliability of distributed detection in clustered wireless sensor networks and formulate it in two cases of parallel and serial distributed detection. An energy-efficient distributed detection method – called hybrid distributed detection – is also proposed in which distributed detection is performed during hop-by-hop transmission of data from the cluster nodes to the cluster head. It is shown that this method conserves much more energy than previously proposed methods and results in considerable improvement in network reliability.

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