Coverage, Connectivity, and Deployment in Wireless Sensor Networks

Recent years have witnessed successful real-world deployments of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in a wide range of civil and military applications. Sensing coverage and network connectivity are two of the most fundamental issues to ensure effective environmental sensing and robust data communication in a WSN application. This chapter presents fundamental studies on the sensing coverage and the network connectivity from mathematical modeling, theoretical analysis, and performance evaluation perspectives. Both lattice WSNs that follow a pattern-based deployment strategy and random WSNs that follow a random deployment strategy are considered. The aim of this chapter is to deliver a systematic study on the fundamental problems in WSNs and provide guidelines in selecting critical network parameters for WSN design and implementation in practice.