arXiv subjects

Pramod K. Varshney

Publications and source records attributed to Pramod K. Varshney.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

arXiv2014

Asymptotic Analysis of Distributed Bayesian Detection with Byzantine Data

In this letter, we consider the problem of distributed Bayesian detection in the presence of data falsifying Byzantines in the network. The problem of distributed detection is formulated as a binary hypothesis test at the fusion center (FC) based on 1-bit data sent by the sensors. Adopting Chernoff information as our performance metric, we study the detection performance of the system under Byzantine attack in the asymptotic regime. The expression for minimum attacking power required by the Byzantines to blind the FC is obtained. More specifically, we show that above a certain fraction of Byzantine attackers in the network, the detection scheme becomes completely incapable of utilizing the sensor data for detection. When the fraction of Byzantines is not sufficient to blind the FC, we also provide closed form expressions for the optimal attacking strategies for the Byzantines that most degrade the detection performance.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2014

On Quantizer Design for Distributed Bayesian Estimation in Sensor Networks

We consider the problem of distributed estimation under the Bayesian criterion and explore the design of optimal quantizers in such a system. We show that, for a conditionally unbiased and efficient estimator at the fusion center and when local observations have identical distributions, it is optimal to partition the local sensors into groups, with all sensors within a group using the same quantization rule. When all the sensors use identical number of decision regions, use of identical quantizers at the sensors is optimal. When the network is constrained by the capacity of the wireless multiple access channel over which the sensors transmit their quantized observations, we show that binary quantizers at the local sensors are optimal under certain conditions. Based on these observations, we address the location parameter estimation problem and present our optimal quantizer design approach. We also derive the performance limit for distributed location parameter estimation under the Bayesian criterion and find the conditions when the widely used threshold quantizer achieves this limit. We corroborate this result using simulations. We then relax the assumption of conditionally independent observations and derive the optimality conditions of quantizers for conditionally dependent observations. Using counter-examples, we also show that the previous results do not hold in this setting of dependent observations and, therefore, identical quantizers are not optimal.

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arXiv2014

Distributed Inference in Tree Networks using Coding Theory

In this paper, we consider the problem of distributed inference in tree based networks. In the framework considered in this paper, distributed nodes make a 1-bit local decision regarding a phenomenon before sending it to the fusion center (FC) via intermediate nodes. We propose the use of coding theory based techniques to solve this distributed inference problem in such structures. Data is progressively compressed as it moves towards the FC. The FC makes the global inference after receiving data from intermediate nodes. Data fusion at nodes as well as at the FC is implemented via error correcting codes. In this context, we analyze the performance for a given code matrix and also design the optimal code matrices at every level of the tree. We address the problems of distributed classification and distributed estimation separately and develop schemes to perform these tasks in tree networks. The proposed schemes are of practical significance due to their simple structure. We study the asymptotic inference performance of our schemes for two different classes of tree networks: fixed height tree networks, and fixed degree tree networks. We show that the proposed schemes are asymptotically optimal under certain conditions.

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arXiv2014

Update-Efficient Error-Correcting Product-Matrix Codes

Regenerating codes provide an efficient way to recover data at failed nodes in distributed storage systems. It has been shown that regenerating codes can be designed to minimize the per-node storage (called MSR) or minimize the communication overhead for regeneration (called MBR). In this work, we propose new encoding schemes for $[n,d]$ error-correcting MSR and MBR codes that generalize our earlier work on error-correcting regenerating codes. We show that by choosing a suitable diagonal matrix, any generator matrix of the $[n,α]$ Reed-Solomon (RS) code can be integrated into the encoding matrix. Hence, MSR codes with the least update complexity can be found. By using the coefficients of generator polynomials of $[n,k]$ and $[n,d]$ RS codes, we present a least-update-complexity encoding scheme for MBR codes. A decoding scheme is proposed that utilizes the $[n,α]$ RS code to perform data reconstruction for MSR codes. The proposed decoding scheme has better error correction capability and incurs the least number of node accesses when errors are present. A new decoding scheme is also proposed for MBR codes that can correct more error-patterns.

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arXiv2014

Target Tracking via Crowdsourcing: A Mechanism Design Approach

In this paper, we propose a crowdsourcing based framework for myopic target tracking by designing an incentive-compatible mechanism based optimal auction in a wireless sensor network (WSN) containing sensors that are selfish and profit-motivated. For typical WSNs which have limited bandwidth, the fusion center (FC) has to distribute the total number of bits that can be transmitted from the sensors to the FC among the sensors. To accomplish the task, the FC conducts an auction by soliciting bids from the selfish sensors, which reflect how much they value their energy cost. Furthermore, the rationality and truthfulness of the sensors are guaranteed in our model. The final problem is formulated as a multiple-choice knapsack problem (MCKP), which is solved by the dynamic programming method in pseudo-polynomial time. Simulation results show the effectiveness of our proposed approach in terms of both the tracking performance and lifetime of the sensor network.

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arXiv2014

Optimal Periodic Sensor Scheduling in Networks of Dynamical Systems

We consider the problem of finding optimal time-periodic sensor schedules for estimating the state of discrete-time dynamical systems. We assume that {multiple} sensors have been deployed and that the sensors are subject to resource constraints, which limits the number of times each can be activated over one period of the periodic schedule. We seek an algorithm that strikes a balance between estimation accuracy and total sensor activations over one period. We make a correspondence between active sensors and the nonzero columns of estimator gain. We formulate an optimization problem in which we minimize the trace of the error covariance with respect to the estimator gain while simultaneously penalizing the number of nonzero columns of the estimator gain. This optimization problem is combinatorial in nature, and we employ the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to find its locally optimal solutions. Numerical results and comparisons with other sensor scheduling algorithms in the literature are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

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arXiv2014

Subspace Recovery from Structured Union of Subspaces

Lower dimensional signal representation schemes frequently assume that the signal of interest lies in a single vector space. In the context of the recently developed theory of compressive sensing (CS), it is often assumed that the signal of interest is sparse in an orthonormal basis. However, in many practical applications, this requirement may be too restrictive. A generalization of the standard sparsity assumption is that the signal lies in a union of subspaces. Recovery of such signals from a small number of samples has been studied recently in several works. Here, we consider the problem of subspace recovery in which our goal is to identify the subspace (from the union) in which the signal lies using a small number of samples, in the presence of noise. More specifically, we derive performance bounds and conditions under which reliable subspace recovery is guaranteed using maximum likelihood (ML) estimation. We begin by treating general unions and then obtain the results for the special case in which the subspaces have structure leading to block sparsity. In our analysis, we treat both general sampling operators and random sampling matrices. With general unions, we show that under certain conditions, the number of measurements required for reliable subspace recovery in the presence of noise via ML is less than that implied using the restricted isometry property which guarantees signal recovery. In the special case of block sparse signals, we quantify the gain achievable over standard sparsity in subspace recovery. Our results also strengthen existing results on sparse support recovery in the presence of noise under the standard sparsity model.

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arXiv2014

Decentralized Subspace Pursuit for Joint Sparsity Pattern Recovery

To solve the problem of joint sparsity pattern recovery in a decen-tralized network, we propose an algorithm named decentralized and collaborative subspace pursuit (DCSP). The basic idea of DCSP is to embed collaboration among nodes and fusion strategy into each iteration of the standard subspace pursuit (SP) algorithm. In DCSP, each node collaborates with several of its neighbors by sharing high-dimensional coefficient estimates and communicates with other remote nodes by exchanging low-dimensional support set estimates. Experimental evaluations show that, compared with several existing algorithms for sparsity pattern recovery, DCSP produces satisfactory results in terms of accuracy of sparsity pattern recovery with much less communication cost.

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arXiv2014

OMP Based Joint Sparsity Pattern Recovery Under Communication Constraints

We address the problem of joint sparsity pattern recovery based on low dimensional multiple measurement vectors (MMVs) in resource constrained distributed networks. We assume that distributed nodes observe sparse signals which share the same sparsity pattern and each node obtains measurements via a low dimensional linear operator. When the measurements are collected at distributed nodes in a communication network, it is often required that joint sparse recovery be performed under inherent resource constraints such as communication bandwidth and transmit/processing power. We present two approaches to take the communication constraints into account while performing common sparsity pattern recovery. First, we explore the use of a shared multiple access channel (MAC) in forwarding observations residing at each node to a fusion center. With MAC, while the bandwidth requirement does not depend on the number of nodes, the fusion center has access to only a linear combination of the observations. We discuss the conditions under which the common sparsity pattern can be estimated reliably. Second, we develop two collaborative algorithms based on Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP), to jointly estimate the common sparsity pattern in a decentralized manner with a low communication overhead. In the proposed algorithms, each node exploits collaboration among neighboring nodes by sharing a small amount of information for fusion at different stages in estimating the indices of the true support in a greedy manner. Efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms are demonstrated via simulations along with a comparison with the most related existing algorithms considering the trade-off between the performance gain and the communication overhead.

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arXiv2014

Reliable Crowdsourcing for Multi-Class Labeling using Coding Theory

Crowdsourcing systems often have crowd workers that perform unreliable work on the task they are assigned. In this paper, we propose the use of error-control codes and decoding algorithms to design crowdsourcing systems for reliable classification despite unreliable crowd workers. Coding-theory based techniques also allow us to pose easy-to-answer binary questions to the crowd workers. We consider three different crowdsourcing models: systems with independent crowd workers, systems with peer-dependent reward schemes, and systems where workers have common sources of information. For each of these models, we analyze classification performance with the proposed coding-based scheme. We develop an ordering principle for the quality of crowds and describe how system performance changes with the quality of the crowd. We also show that pairing among workers and diversification of the questions help in improving system performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed coding-based scheme using both simulated data and real datasets from Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing microtask platform. Results suggest that use of good codes may improve the performance of the crowdsourcing task over typical majority-voting approaches.

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arXiv2014

Distributed Inference with M-ary Quantized Data in the Presence of Byzantine Attacks

The problem of distributed inference with M-ary quantized data at the sensors is investigated in the presence of Byzantine attacks. We assume that the attacker does not have knowledge about either the true state of the phenomenon of interest, or the quantization thresholds used at the sensors. Therefore, the Byzantine nodes attack the inference network by modifying modifying the symbol corresponding to the quantized data to one of the other M symbols in the quantization alphabet-set and transmitting the false symbol to the fusion center (FC). In this paper, we find the optimal Byzantine attack that blinds any distributed inference network. As the quantization alphabet size increases, a tremendous improvement in the security performance of the distributed inference network is observed. We also investigate the problem of distributed inference in the presence of resource-constrained Byzantine attacks. In particular, we focus our attention on two problems: distributed detection and distributed estimation, when the Byzantine attacker employs a highly-symmetric attack. For both the problems, we find the optimal attack strategies employed by the attacker to maximally degrade the performance of the inference network. A reputation-based scheme for identifying malicious nodes is also presented as the network's strategy to mitigate the impact of Byzantine threats on the inference performance of the distributed sensor network.

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arXiv2013

Recovery of Sparse Matrices via Matrix Sketching

In this paper, we consider the problem of recovering an unknown sparse matrix X from the matrix sketch Y = AX B^T. The dimension of Y is less than that of X, and A and B are known matrices. This problem can be solved using standard compressive sensing (CS) theory after converting it to vector form using the Kronecker operation. In this case, the measurement matrix assumes a Kronecker product structure. However, as the matrix dimension increases the associated computational complexity makes its use prohibitive. We extend two algorithms, fast iterative shrinkage threshold algorithm (FISTA) and orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) to solve this problem in matrix form without employing the Kronecker product. While both FISTA and OMP with matrix inputs are shown to be equivalent in performance to their vector counterparts with the Kronecker product, solving them in matrix form is shown to be computationally more efficient. We show that the computational gain achieved by FISTA with matrix inputs over its vector form is more significant compared to that achieved by OMP.

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arXiv2013

Target Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks using Error Correcting Codes

In this work, we consider the task of target localization using quantized data in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). We propose an energy efficient localization scheme by modeling it as an iterative classification problem. We design coding based iterative approaches for target localization where at every iteration, the Fusion Center (FC) solves an M-ary hypothesis testing problem and decides the Region of Interest (ROI) for the next iteration. The coding based iterative approach works well even in the presence of Byzantine (malicious) sensors in the network. We further consider the effect of non-ideal channels. We suggest the use of soft-decision decoding to compensate for the loss due to the presence of fading channels between the local sensors and the FC. We evaluate the performance of the proposed schemes in terms of the Byzantine fault tolerance capability and probability of detection of the target region. We also present performance bounds which help us in designing the system. We provide asymptotic analysis of the proposed schemes and show that the schemes achieve perfect region detection irrespective of the noise variance when the number of sensors tends to infinity. Our numerical results show that the proposed schemes provide a similar performance in terms of Mean Square Error (MSE) as compared to the traditional Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) but are computationally much more efficient and are resilient to errors due to Byzantines and non-ideal channels.

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arXiv2013

Distributed Detection in Tree Topologies with Byzantines

In this paper, we consider the problem of distributed detection in tree topologies in the presence of Byzantines. The expression for minimum attacking power required by the Byzantines to blind the fusion center (FC) is obtained. More specifically, we show that when more than a certain fraction of individual node decisions are falsified, the decision fusion scheme becomes completely incapable. We obtain closed form expressions for the optimal attacking strategies that minimize the detection error exponent at the FC. We also look at the possible counter-measures from the FC's perspective to protect the network from these Byzantines. We formulate the robust topology design problem as a bi-level program and provide an efficient algorithm to solve it. We also provide some numerical results to gain insights into the solution.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2013

Robust Distributed Maximum Likelihood Estimation with Dependent Quantized Data

In this paper, we consider distributed maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) with dependent quantized data under the assumption that the structure of the joint probability density function (pdf) is known, but it contains unknown deterministic parameters. The parameters may include different vector parameters corresponding to marginal pdfs and parameters that describe dependence of observations across sensors. Since MLE with a single quantizer is sensitive to the choice of thresholds due to the uncertainty of pdf, we concentrate on MLE with multiple groups of quantizers (which can be determined by the use of prior information or some heuristic approaches) to fend off against the risk of a poor/outlier quantizer. The asymptotic efficiency of the MLE scheme with multiple quantizers is proved under some regularity conditions and the asymptotic variance is derived to be the inverse of a weighted linear combination of Fisher information matrices based on multiple different quantizers which can be used to show the robustness of our approach. As an illustrative example, we consider an estimation problem with a bivariate non-Gaussian pdf that has applications in distributed constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detection systems. Simulations show the robustness of the proposed MLE scheme especially when the number of quantized measurements is small.

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arXiv2013

False Discovery Rate Based Distributed Detection in the Presence of Byzantines

Recent literature has shown that the control of False Discovery Rate (FDR) for distributed detection in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can provide substantial improvement in detection performance over conventional design methodologies. In this paper, we further investigate system design issues in FDR based distributed detection. We demonstrate that improved system design may be achieved by employing the Kolmogorov-Smirnov distance metric instead of the deflection coefficient, as originally proposed in Ray&VarshneyAES11. We also analyze the performance of FDR based distributed detection in the presence of Byzantines. Byzantines are malicious sensors which send falsified information to the Fusion Center (FC) to deteriorate system performance. We provide analytical and simulation results on the global detection probability as a function of the fraction of Byzantines in the network. It is observed that the detection performance degrades considerably when the fraction of Byzantines is large. Hence, we propose an adaptive algorithm at the FC which learns the Byzantines' behavior over time and changes the FDR parameter to overcome the loss in detection performance. Detailed simulation results are provided to demonstrate the robustness of the proposed adaptive algorithm to Byzantine attacks in WSNs.

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arXiv2013

Hybrid Maximum Likelihood Modulation Classification Using Multiple Radios

The performance of a modulation classifier is highly sensitive to channel signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In this paper, we focus on amplitude-phase modulations and propose a modulation classification framework based on centralized data fusion using multiple radios and the hybrid maximum likelihood (ML) approach. In order to alleviate the computational complexity associated with ML estimation, we adopt the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. Due to SNR diversity, the proposed multi-radio framework provides robustness to channel SNR. Numerical results show the superiority of the proposed approach with respect to single radio approaches as well as to modulation classifiers using moments based estimators.

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arXiv2013

Adaptive Non-myopic Quantizer Design for Target Tracking in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we investigate the problem of nonmyopic (multi-step ahead) quantizer design for target tracking using a wireless sensor network. Adopting the alternative conditional posterior Cramer-Rao lower bound (A-CPCRLB) as the optimization metric, we theoretically show that this problem can be temporally decomposed over a certain time window. Based on sequential Monte-Carlo methods for tracking, i.e., particle filters, we design the local quantizer adaptively by solving a particlebased non-linear optimization problem which is well suited for the use of interior-point algorithm and easily embedded in the filtering process. Simulation results are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

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