Decentralized two-sided sequential tests for a normal mean

This article is concerned with decentralized sequential testing of a normal mean μ with two-sided alternatives. It is assumed that in a single-sensor network system with limited local memory, i.i.d, normal raw observations are observed at the local sensor, and quantized into binary messages that are sent to the fusion center, which makes a final decision between the null hypothesis H_o : μ = 0 and the alternative hypothesis HI : μ == ±1. We propose a decentralized sequential test using the idea of tandem quantizers (or equivalently, a oneshot feedback). Surprisingly, our proposed test only uses the quantizers of the form I(Xn ≥ λ), but it is shown to be asymptotically Bayes. Moreover, by adopting the principle of invariance, we also investigate decentralized invariant tests with the stationary quantizers of the form I (|X_n| ≤ λ), and show that λ = 0.5 only leads to a suboptimal decentralized invariant sequential test. Numerical simulations are conducted to support our arguments.