Deployment Issues in Wireless Sensor Networks

The performance of wireless sensor networks depends largely on the deployment of sensor nodes as well as their lifetime mainly determined by the energy consumption. Most current attention, however, has been paid to energyefficient deployment. With the goal of facilitating further evolution of wireless sensor networks, recently proposed deployment schemes for wireless sensor networks are surveyed. The focus is on coverage and connectivity, which are regarded as the most important respects of network performance and energyefficiency. Depending on the application and different actions in the network, coverage issues are classified into static and dynamic ones, while connectivity issues into pure connectivity and routing algorithm based connectivity. An overview of each of these areas is presented, and the performance of existing methodologies is discussed. In order to spark new interests and developments in this field, some crucial open issues are pointed out.