Analysis of Target Detection Probability in Randomly Deployed Sensor Networks

The main functionality of a surveillance wireless sensor network is to detect unauthorized traversals in a field. In this paper, we develop a formulation to determine the probability of detecting a randomly positioned target by a set of binary sensors to serve as the deployment quality measure. This formulation leads to a recipe to determine the number of sensors required to deliver a certain deployment quality level. The sensing- and communication-neighbor degrees which can be used as design criteria in a sensor network are defined and calculated. The model is verified by simulations whose outcomes closely match the analytical results.