Assessing Design Tradeoffs in Deploying Undersea Distributed Sensor Networks

In this paper we explore design issues in the deployment of distributed sensor networks (DSNs). In particular, the search performance of a notional surveillance network, and its dependence on sensor placement (for a fixed number of sensors) is studied. We describe a search objective for systems of sensors that utilize spatio-temporal techniques to combine individual sensor detections (which are spatially consistent with expected target behavior) in order to determine target existence in the field (track coverage). We utilize this objective in a genetic algorithm to optimize the search coverage as a function of the sensor density within a fixed search region. Target dynamics are treated as parameters with associated probability distributions, and enter the search objective as random parameters. We present several examples of optimal placement given target dynamics and sensor characteristics.