Underwater Sensor Field Design using Game Theory

When designing a field of passive underwater sensors, a series of assumptions are typically made, with one of the more glaring being range independence throughout an operational area. It is unlikely that a large water space will have uniform acoustic characteristics, meaning that the performance of a sensor will vary based on its physical location. Considering that a threat may also have knowledge of the acoustics of an area, a field designer could divide the area into sectors based on changes in acoustics and predict how often a threat submarine will visit each sector of the area to increase the field´s submarine detection capabilities. In this work, an operational area is split up into four quadrants with varying acoustic characteristics and the probability of visitation to each quadrant by a threat submarine is determined using game theory. A new Game Theory Field Design (GTFD) model is proposed that properly allocates sensors to each quadrant according to the visitation probabilities. When compared with a random field design model that does not consider these probabilities, GTFD is shown to offer a significant improvement in terms of detection capability.