Error Probability Bounds for Binary Relay Trees with Crummy Sensors

We study the detection error probability associated with balanced binary relay trees, in which sensor nodes fail with some probability. We consider N identical and independent crummy sensors, represented by leaf nodes of the tree. The root of the tree represents the fusion center, which makes the final decision between two hypotheses. Every other node is a relay node, which fuses at most two binary messages into one binary message and forwards the new message to its parent node. We derive tight upper and lower bounds for the total error probability at the fusion center as functions of N and characterize how fast the total error probability converges to 0 with respect to N. We show that the convergence of the total error probability is sub-linear, with the same decay exponent as that in a balanced binary relay tree without sensor failures. We also show that the total error probability converges to 0, even if the individual sensors have total error probabilities that converge to 1/2 and the failure probabilities that converge to 1, provided that the convergence rates are sufficiently slow.