Enlarged Deployment Regions to Circumvent the Conditional Dependence and Composite Hypothesis Problems in Sensor Detection Systems

It is usually difficult to design randomly deployed sensor systems to detect a signal emitter in a region of interest because measurements are conditionally dependent in general and the alternative hypothesis is composite. To circumvent these problems, this paper presents two system design approaches: in Approach 1, a modified decay function is considered; in Approach 2, a modified region of interest and a suitable distribution for the emitter location are considered; and both approaches use enlarged sensor deployment regions. It is shown that both approaches cause the measurements to become conditionally independent and identically distributed, cause the alternative hypothesis to become simple, and generate designs that ensure a detection performance. This paper further evaluates how conservative each approach is and compares them, helping a designer choose the most suitable approach for a situation.