Research on Forest Fire Monitoring Quality Variation with Wireless Sensor Node Density

The early detection and monitoring of forest fire is important for fire suppression quickly and reducing the loss of human and property. At present, forest fire monitoring techniques based on wireless sensor networks have drawn more and more attention from both academic and forestry field. In order to reduce the cost of monitoring system, it is necessary to monitor a biggest area with sensor nodes of given number. In this paper, based on the forest fire circular propagation model, the case where the sensors are located in a regular triangle grid is analyzed. Some results which relate the sensor node density to the forest fire monitoring quality are presented. The theoretical analysis and the results of Monte Carlo simulations show that, the expect value of the time to fire detection is proportional to the ration of node density to the fire propagation speed, and the expect value of burned area only depends on the node density, but it doesn´t depend on the distribution of the fire ignition and fire propagation model.