New trends in sensor coverage modeling and related techniques: A brief synthesis

Sensor coverage model is a mathematical formulation that attempts to quantify the sensors capability to sense some physical phenomena at some locations of interest. Typically, a space point is said to be covered if its coverage measure, the quantification output of such models, satisfies some predefined criteria depending on the application. Choosing a coverage model is a crucial step in a wide range of wireless sensor networks applications including sensor placement and sensor redundancy detection, among other problems. The aim of this paper is to briefly summarize sensor coverage models described in the literature and their related motivations and applications.