Distance Distribution Between Two Random Nodes in Arbitrary Polygons

Abstract

Distance distributions are a key building block in stochastic geometry modelling of wireless networks and in many other fields in mathematics and science. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for analytically computing the closed form probability density function (PDF) of the distance between two random nodes each uniformly randomly distributed in respective arbitrary (convex or concave) polygon regions (which may be disjoint or overlap or coincide). The proposed framework is based on measure theory and uses polar decomposition for simplifying and calculating the integrals to obtain closed form results. We validate our proposed framework by comparison with simulations and published closed form results in the literature for simple cases. We illustrate the versatility and advantage of the proposed framework by deriving closed form results for a case not yet reported in the literature. Finally, we also develop a Mathematica implementation of the proposed framework which allows a user to define any two arbitrary polygons and conveniently determine the distance distribution numerically.