The Effects of Deployment Irregularity on Coverage in Wireless Sensor Networks

One commonly employed method to calculate whether a wireless sensor network can adequately sense the entirety of a region of interest is to define the area that a sensor can monitor and ensure that the union of all these areas leaves no part of the region uncovered. This paper shows the results of a series of experiments in simulation designed to show how various degrees of deviation from intended node placement locations in a wireless sensor network affect the achievable coverage using this model. The main result is that irregular deployments are only slightly less efficient than highly regular ones but that since they have less redundancy they fail before regular cases. This is manifested by the regular patterns maintaining coverage by increasing the number of active nodes while the irregular ones fail to achieve coverage despite having activated a low proportion of the available nodes due to the remaining nodes being situated at ineffective locations.