On binomial and Poisson sums arising from the displacement of randomly placed sensors

Abstract

We re-visit the asymptotics of a binomial and a Poisson sum which arose as (average) displacement costs when moving randomly placed sensors to anchor positions. The first-order asymptotics of these sums were derived in several stages in a series of recent papers. In this paper, we give a unified approach based on the classical Laplace method with which one can also derive more terms in the asymptotic expansions. Moreover, in a special case, full asymptotic expansions can be given which even hold as identities. This will be proved by a combinatorial approach and systematic ways of computing all coefficients of these identities will be discussed as well.