WSN04-2: Differential Random Deployment for Sensing Coverage in Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to the cost constraint, it is impossible or unnecessary for a wireless sensor network to provide full area coverage in many applications. To mitigate the negative impacts of incomplete coverage, it is critical to realize that the importance of different locations of a sensing field is often non-uniform in practice. By strategically allocating more sensor nodes to the area of more importance, the differential random deployment can effectively decrease the loss for not detecting interesting events, as compared to the uniform random deployment. In this paper, we study the differential random deployment of sensor nodes in depth. We discuss a number of factors that affect the design of the differential random deployment density function. Because of the inherent complexity, we propose a heuristic structure of the differential deployment density function. The effectiveness of our proposal is verified in the performance study via simulation.