Sensor Deployment Strategy for Detection of Targets Traversing a Region

Sensing devices can be deployed to form a network for monitoring a region of interest. This paper investigates detection of a target traversing the region being monitored by using collaborative target detection algorithms among the sensors. The objective of the study is to develop a low cost sensor deployment strategy to meet a performance criteria. The paper defines a path exposure metric as a measure of goodness of deployment. It then gives a problem formulation for the random sensor deployment and defines cost functions that take into account the cost of single sensors and the cost of deployment. A sequential sensor deployment approach is then developed. The paper illustrates that the overall cost of deployment can be minimized to achieve the desired detection performance by appropriately choosing the number of sensors deployed in each step of the sequential deployment strategy.