The effects of nodes spatial distribution on the performance of wireless sensor networks

This paper addresses the effect of nodes spatial distribution on wireless sensor network (WSN) performance, in terms of the error in the reconstruction of the physical signal sensed by nodes. Two different scenarios are considered, one with nodes on a regular grid and one with nodes randomly distributed in the l-dimensional space. The error in signal reconstruction is analytically obtained as a function of sensor density and node failure probability for both the scenarios. From the results, it is possible to establish when it is more convenient to achieve the target quality by increasing the node density or by increasing the node reliability and positioning precision.