Impact of Heterogeneity on Coverage and Broadcast Reachability in Wireless Sensor Networks

While most existing research efforts in the area of wireless sensor networks have focused on networks with identical nodes, deploying sensors with different capabilities has become a feasible choice. In this paper, we focus on sensor networks with two types of nodes that differ in their capabilities, and discuss the effects of heterogeneity of sensing and transmission ranges on the network coverage and broadcast reachability. Our work characterizes how the introduction of a few sensor nodes with better capabilities can reduce the number of total required sensors without sacrificing the coverage and the broadcast reachability. Analytical results are validated via simulations. This work can serve as a guideline for designing large-scale sensor networks cost-effectively. It can also be extended to more complicated heterogeneous wireless sensor networks with more than two types of sensors.