Cost Efficient Wireless Camera Sensor Deployment Strategy for Environment Monitoring Applications

Availability of low cost low power camera sensors is likely to make possible applications that may otherwise have been unimaginable. In this paper we investigate a cost efficient camera sensor deployment strategy based on random deployment of sensors to monitor and/or surveillance a region of interest. We assume that there are costs associated with the sensors as well as with the deployments and our goal is to minimize the total cost while satisfying the desired coverage requirement. We develop analytical methods to derive the expected coverage of a single sensor as well as the joint coverage for a given number of homogenous and heterogenous camera sensors. Following this we propose an adaptive sensor deployment strategy based on our analytical method. We then evaluate the expected cost of our deployment strategy by deriving expressions for the number of deployments and the number of sensors deployed during each deployment as a function of the probability distributions of joint coverage by sensors. Finally, we carry out simulation studies to validate the analytical results and to demonstrate that our strategy leads to near optimal numbers of sensors and deployments and hence the overall cost of deployment.