Processing and communications rate requirements in sensor networks for physical thread assessment

Sensor networks for the assessment of physical threats in critical infrastructure have the potential to provide continuous and reliable information on illegal activity over wide areas. In order to reach that potential, it is essential for the sensor network to operate efficiently by conducting processing and communication operations on a very limited power budget. In this work, it is shown that when sequentially assessing physical threats using a sensor network, the required processing and communication load is directly related to estimation uncertainty. It is, furthermore, shown that the processing and communications rate required for sequential estimation using a sensor network is much less than the rate required for processing and transmitting all data available at the nodes. This result can be used to reduce hardware cost and power requirements of the sensor network.