An underwater sensor allocation scheme for a range dependent environment

A series of assumptions is typically made when designing a field of passive underwater sensors. One of the more glaring is range independence throughout an operational area. It is unlikely that a large water space will have uniform acoustic characteristics throughout, i.e., the performance of a sensor will vary based upon its physical location. In an area clearance scenario, where there is no apparent target for an adversary to gravitate towards, such as a ship or a port, it is difficult to determine where the field designer should allocate sensors so that their deployment locations can be planned efficiently. To intelligently allocate sensors, a field designer could first divide an area into sectors of relatively uniform acoustics, based upon variations in acoustic characteristics throughout the area. A prediction of how often a threat submarine will visit each sector can then be made in order to increase the field’s detection capabilities. In this work, an area of interest is divided into sectors of varying geographic size and acoustic characteristics and the probability of visitation to each sector by a threat submarine is determined by solving a minimax matrix game. The Game Theory Field Design (GTFD) model is proposed, which allocates sensors to sectors of relatively uniform acoustics according to the visitation probabilities of an adversary, against adversaries of varying intelligence. In a comparison with two models that do not consider these visitation probabilities and only examine either acoustic characteristics or the size of the sectors, GTFD is shown to offer a significant improvement in terms of overall field detection capability against intelligent adversaries.