Detection capabilities of randomly-deployed underwater sensors

A problem of interest in ocean engineering is the defense of a particular region of the ocean, often referred to as a sea base. Among the primary challenges in defending the sea base is effective and efficient detection of intruders that travel through the space. A recent focus on undersea distributed networked systems (UDNS) has raised the question of how effectively small, randomly distributed sensors can detect such intruders relative to larger sensing platforms. We develop an analytical framework for characterizing the detection performance of a set of sensors deployed within a sea base. Focusing on the detection of a target traveling a straight line, we employ our framework to compare the performance of various sensing approaches as a function of the number of sensors, sensing radius, sensor location, and sensor cost. Our results reveal that, when sensor cost scales with sensing radius, the detection vs. cost trade-off can be improved by employing a larger number of less powerful sensors.