Evaluating the direct blast effect in multistatic sonar networks using Monte Carlo simulation

Multistatic sonar networks generalize traditional sonar networks by allowing sources and receivers to occupy different physical locations. Although there are many advantages to a multistatic approach, there are also additional analytic challenges. One such challenge involves the direct blast effect, which can cause targets to go undetected even if they are within the nominal detection range of a sonar network. Previous work has considered the problem of optimally provisioning and deploying a multistatic sonar network while neglecting to consider the blind zone. In this paper, we conduct Monte Carlo simulations to evaluate the impact of the direct blast effect on the performance of such a network. We find that for large pulse lengths, the direct blast effect can significantly decrease the performance of a multistatic network. Moreover, the optimal deployment policy can differ substantially when the direct blast effect is taken into account.