Decentralized Detection with Many Sensors: Optimality of Exchangeable and Identical Encoding Policies

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Sanjari, Sina, Saldi, Naci, Gezici, Sinan, Yüksel, Serdar
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866918148315283456
author Sanjari, Sina
Saldi, Naci
Gezici, Sinan
Yüksel, Serdar
author_facet Sanjari, Sina
Saldi, Naci
Gezici, Sinan
Yüksel, Serdar
contents We study a class of binary detection problems involving a single fusion center and a large or countably infinite number of sensors. Each sensor acts under a decentralized information structure, accessing only a local noisy observation related to the hypothesis. Based on this observation, sensors select policies to transmit a quantized signal through their actions to the fusion center, which makes the final decision using only these actions. This paper makes the following contributions: i) In the finitely many sensor setting, we provide a formal proof that an optimal encoding policy exists, and such an optimal policy is independent, deterministic, and of threshold type for the sensors and the maximum \emph{a posteriori} probability type for the fusion center; ii) For the finitely many sensor setting, we further show that an optimal encoding policy exhibits an exchangeability (permutation invariance) property; iii) We establish that an optimal encoding policy exists that is symmetric (identical) and independent across sensors in the infinitely many sensor setting under the error exponent cost; iv) Finally, we show that a symmetric optimal policy for the infinite population regime with the error exponent cost is approximately optimal for the large but finite sensor regime under the same cost criterion. We anticipate that the mathematical program used in the paper will find applications in several other massive communications applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_21724
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Decentralized Detection with Many Sensors: Optimality of Exchangeable and Identical Encoding Policies
Sanjari, Sina
Saldi, Naci
Gezici, Sinan
Yüksel, Serdar
Optimization and Control
We study a class of binary detection problems involving a single fusion center and a large or countably infinite number of sensors. Each sensor acts under a decentralized information structure, accessing only a local noisy observation related to the hypothesis. Based on this observation, sensors select policies to transmit a quantized signal through their actions to the fusion center, which makes the final decision using only these actions. This paper makes the following contributions: i) In the finitely many sensor setting, we provide a formal proof that an optimal encoding policy exists, and such an optimal policy is independent, deterministic, and of threshold type for the sensors and the maximum \emph{a posteriori} probability type for the fusion center; ii) For the finitely many sensor setting, we further show that an optimal encoding policy exhibits an exchangeability (permutation invariance) property; iii) We establish that an optimal encoding policy exists that is symmetric (identical) and independent across sensors in the infinitely many sensor setting under the error exponent cost; iv) Finally, we show that a symmetric optimal policy for the infinite population regime with the error exponent cost is approximately optimal for the large but finite sensor regime under the same cost criterion. We anticipate that the mathematical program used in the paper will find applications in several other massive communications applications.
title Decentralized Detection with Many Sensors: Optimality of Exchangeable and Identical Encoding Policies
topic Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21724