Efficient Coverage Planning for Grid-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper we study efficient triangular grid-based sensor deployment planning for coverage when sensor placements are perturbed by random errors around their corresponding grid vertices, where the random errors are modeled by uniform displacements inside error disks of a given finite radius. The average coverage percentage of the sensing field is derived as a function of the length of the grid tiles d, and the radius of the random error disks, R. Our expressions for the average coverage percentage are computed numerically and verified by Monte-Carlo simulations. The analytical methods can be used with other types of grid-based deployment with little modification, such as square grid-based deployment. One appealing feature of grid-based deployment that we observe is that the sensing coverage is rather resilient to random errors. Based on this observation and the quantitative results from our analysis, we discuss several approaches to efficient grid-based deployment planning for coverage and illustrate these through numerical examples.