Influence of Sensing Model and Sensor Failure on the Coverage Performance of Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Coverage is one of the most importance performance metric of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) as it shows a well an installed network is monitoring a given region of interest. It is found that the binary sensing range model does not imitate the true sensing characteristics of sensor nodes (SNs) as it ignores the environmental factors affecting the sensing abilities of SNs, thus, over estimates the coverage performance. To consider the influence of environmental factors in the sensing characteristics, Elfes sensing model was proposed which is a probabilistic sensing range model. Further, sensor failure is an important issue and may cause disrupted and declined coverage and connectivity. This paper investigates the coverage performance of WSN spread in a circular region (CR) employing both Elfes and binary sensing range models. The coverage metric obtained using the derived expression employing binary sensing range model provides higher coverage as compared to coverage achieved using Elfes model. Besides, we analysed the impact of different network parameters on network coverage and found that the sensing range and the SNs count have positive impact whereas sensor failure probability and required value of  have negative impact on the networks -coverage metric.