  Most studies that consider the problem of estimating the location of a point
source in wireless sensor networks assume that the source location is estimated
by a set of spatially distributed sensors, whose locations are fixed. Motivated
by the fact that the observation quality and performance of the localization
algorithm depend on the location of the sensors, which could be randomly
distributed, this paper investigates the performance of a recently proposed
energy-based source-localization algorithm under the assumption that the
sensors are positioned according to a uniform clustering process. Practical
considerations such as the existence and size of the exclusion zones around
each sensor and the source will be studied. By introducing a novel performance
measure called the estimation outage, it will be shown how parameters related
to the network geometry such as the distance between the source and the closest
sensor to it as well as the number of sensors within a region surrounding the
source affect the localization performance.
