Weaving a Proper Net to Catch Large Objects

Wireless sensor networks are usually over-engineered, i.e., more than required sensors are deployed and remain active in order to cover each point in the monitored field with a high probability at any time instance. Intuitively, when the size and the shape of objects are considered, any net with holes no smaller than the size of the object would work fine. In this paper, we build a mathematical model to investigate the impact of size and shape of objects on network configuration. We derive analytical results that provide practitioners with insights on how to weave an effective sensor "net" for object detection with minimum number of active sensors.