Assume that nn mobile sensors are thrown uniformly and independently at random with the uniform distribution on the unit interval. We study the expected sum over all sensors ii from 11 to n,n, where the contribution of the ithith sensor is its displacement from the current location to the anchor equidistant point ti=in−12n,ti=in−12n, raised to the athath power, when aa is an odd natural number.
As a consequence, we derive the following asymptotic identity. Fix aa positive integer. Let Xi:nXi:n denote the ithith order statistic from a random sample of size nn from the Uniform(0,1)(0,1) population. Then
n∑i=1E[|Xi:n−E[Xi:n]|a]=Γ(a2+1)2a2(1+a)nna2+O(√nna2),n∑i=1E[∣∣
∣∣Xi:n−E[Xi:n]∣∣
∣∣a]=Γ(a2+1)2a2(1+a)nna2+O(√nna2),
where Γ(z)Γ(z) is the Gamma function.