Nearest Neighbor and Contact Distance Distribution for Binomial Point Process on Spherical Surfaces

Abstract: This letter characterizes the statistics of the contact distance and the nearest neighbor (NN) distance for binomial point processes (BPP) spatially-distributed on spherical surfaces. We consider a setup of $n$ concentric spheres, with each sphere $S_k$ has a radius $r_k$ and $N_k$ points that are uniformly distributed on its surface. For that setup, we obtain the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the distance to the nearest point from two types o observation points: (i) the observation point is not a part of the point process and located on a concentric sphere with a radius $r_e<r_k\forall k$, which corresponds to the contact distance distribution, and (ii) the observation point belongs to the point process, which corresponds to the nearest-neighbor (NN) distance distribution.