A sensor network is considered where at each sensor a sequence of random
variables is observed. At each time step, a processed version of the
observations is transmitted from the sensors to a common node called the fusion
center. At some unknown point in time the distribution of observations at an
unknown subset of the sensor nodes changes. The objective is to detect the
outlying sequences as quickly as possible, subject to constraints on the false
alarm rate, the cost of observations taken at each sensor, and the cost of
communication between the sensors and the fusion center. Minimax formulations
are proposed for the above problem and algorithms are proposed that are shown
to be asymptotically optimal for the proposed formulations, as the false alarm
rate goes to zero. It is also shown, via numerical studies, that the proposed
algorithms perform significantly better than those based on fractional
sampling, in which the classical algorithms from the literature are used and
the constraint on the cost of observations is met by using the outcome of a
sequence of biased coin tosses, independent of the observation process.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Nov 2014. arXiv
admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1408.474