Modeling Detection Latency with Collaborative Mobile Sensing Architecture

Detection latency, which is defined as the time from the target arrival to the time of the first detection, is an important metric for the performance of sensor networks carrying out target detection, especially when the target is malicious or hostile. It characterizes the efficiency of detecting the presence of a target in a region of interest. Traditionally, stationary sensor networks are used to perform such sensing tasks. Consequently, nearly all research literature for the target detection problem has focused on stationary sensor networks. This paper addresses the problem of detecting the presence/absence of a target using a mobile sensor network. An analytic method is proposed to model the detection latency based on a collaborative sensing architecture. Detection latency for different node mobility models is presented. The accuracy of the analytic model is verified by simulations. This paper also compares the performance of mobile and stationary sensor networks. The comparison shows that if the target is present at the worst possible location in a given deployment, then detection latency of mobile sensor networks is considerably shorter as compared to that of stationary networks with the same number of nodes.