Probabilistic coverage in wireless sensor networks

The sensing capabilities of networked sensors are affected by environmental factors in real deployment and it is imperative to have practical considerations at the design stage in order to anticipate this sensing behavior. We investigate the coverage issues in wireless sensor networks based on probabilistic coverage and propose a distributed probabilistic coverage algorithm (PCA) to evaluate the degree of confidence in detection probability provided by a randomly deployed sensor network. The probabilistic approach is a deviation from the idealistic assumption of uniform circular disc for sensing coverage used in the binary detection model. Simulation results show that area coverage calculated by using PCA is more accurate than the idealistic binary detection model