An Analysis of Data Fusion For Radiation Detection and Localization

Submitted to the FUSION 2010, 13th International Conference on Information Fusion, 26-29 July 2010 EICC Edinburgh, UK

Annie H. Liu, Julian J. Bunn, K. Mani Chandy

This paper explores fundamental relations between critical parameters of distributed sensor networks (DSN) that detect and locate radiation sources. The paper presents mathematical analyses and Monte
Carlo methods that help understand fundamental trade-offs between the time to detect radiation sources, the probabilities of false positives and negatives, system cost, numbers of sensors, locations of sensors, mixes of sensors of different capabilities, benefits of data fusion, and communication load.