Experimental validation of a distributed sensor network concept

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2019-10, Vol.146 (4), p.3016-3017
• Main Authors: Mignerey, Peter C., Finette, Steven I., Edelmann, Geoffrey F., Emokpae, Lloyd, Schindall, Jeffrey
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/1.5137455

Autonomous distributed systems comprising many sensors provide a new paradigm for passive detection of acoustic sources in the ocean. Such systems can be designed to achieve global consensus concerning source detection through distributed computation without the presence of a fusion center. In this presentation, individual sensors make information-theoretic assessments of whether a target is present or absent, and communicate that information within a network to enable a global detection consensus. To obtain the consensus, each sensor obtains neighboring information that populates a state vector, which is reduced by an inner-product with a dynamical-system iteration vector to obtain a scalar estimate of the global information. The process iterates until the network reaches a consensus on the detection information, after which the process starts anew on a subsequent block of acoustic data. An experiment was conducted on the New Jersey Shelf in early May 2019 to evaluate the above ideas. This talk will cover an overview of information-theoretic detection, the convergence of a linear state system on a network graph, robustness with respect to node failure, and the behavior of a dynamical detection system deployed in the ocean. [Work supported by the U.S. Office of Naval Research.]