Stochastic coverage in event-driven sensor networks

One of the primary tasks of sensor networks is to detect events in a field of interest (FoI). To quantify how well events are detected in such networks, coverage of events is a fundamental problem to be studied. However, traditional studies mostly focus on analyzing the coverage of the FoI, which is usually called area coverage. In this paper, we propose an analytic method to evaluate the performance of event coverage in sensor networks with randomly deployed sensor nodes and stochastic event occurrences. We provide formulas to calculate the probabilities of event coverage and event missing. The numerical results show how these two probabilities change with the sensor and event densities. Moreover, simulations are conducted to validate the analytic method. This method can provide guidelines for determining the amount of sensor nodes to achieve a certain level of coverage in event-driven sensor networks.