ABSTRACT

A sensor network operates on an infrastructure of sensing, computation, and communication, through which it perceives the evolution of physical dynamic processes in its environment. It is data centric [1] because data from sensor nodes are the most important to this application. A common characteristic of information fusion in sensor networks is that data streamed from di¡erent sources are brought together through a communication network. Ÿe following factors need to be taken into account:

• Typically, there are thousands of sensor nodes in a wireless sensor network. It is almost impossible to have a global centralized fusion center. In other words, the data fusion scheme has to be designed and implemented in a distributed fashion for wireless sensor networks.