Analysis of Network Performance
One of the primary tasks of wireless sensor networks (WSN) is to monitor a Field of Interest (FoI). The availability of observations is directly related to the number of sensors able to sense a particular event, and can be quantified by computing the fraction of the FoI covered by at least a threshold number of sensors, also know as k-coverage. Previous work on evaluating the k-coverage, assumed that sensors have identical sensing areas and/or conform to the idealized unit disk model. However, sensors of multiple sensing modalities such as acoustic, optical, infrared, CCD, magnetic, or thermal, have sensing areas significantly different than the unit disk model and may be concurrently deployed, thus forming a heterogeneous WSN.
Alternatively, for applications such as area surveillance and habitat monitoring the network performance is related on how well the deployed network can monitor mobile targets that cross the FoI. The latter can be quantified by computing the probability of detecting a target crossing the FoI. As in the case of k-coverage, analytically computing the target detection probability assuming a heterogeneous WSN is a challenge.