Extension of deflection coefficient for linear fusion of quantized reports in cooperative sensing

Maximizing the so-called deflection coefficient is commonly used as an effective approach to design cooperative sensing schemes with low computational complexity. In this paper, an extension to the deflection coefficient is proposed which captures the effects of the quantization processes at the sensing nodes, jointly with the impact of linear combining at the fusion center. The proposed parameter is then used to formulate a new mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem as a fast suboptimal method to design a distributed detection scenario where the nodes report their sensing outcomes to a fusion center through nonideal digital links. Numerical evaluations show that the performance of the proposed method is very close to the optimal case.