The Impact of Quasi-equally Spaced Sensor Layouts on Field Reconstruction

We consider wireless sensor networks whose nodes are randomly deployed and, thus, provide an irregular sampling of the sensed field. The field is assumed to be bandlimited; a sink node collects the data gathered by the sensors and reconstructs the field by using a technique based on linear filtering. By taking the mean square error (MSE) as performance metric, we evaluate the effect of quasi-equally spaced sensor layouts on the quality of the reconstructed signal. The MSE is derived through asymptotic analysis for different sensor spatial distributions, and for two of them we are able to obtain an approximate closed form expression. The case of uniformly distributed sensors is also considered for the sake of comparison. The validity of our asymptotic analysis is shown by comparison against numerical results and it is proven to hold even for a small number of nodes. Finally, with the help of a simple example, we show the key role that our results play in the deployment of sensor networks.