Quantifying the effects of placement errors on WSN connectivity in grid-based deployments

Device deployment plays a key role in the performance of any Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) application. WSN device deployment (i.e. the numbers and positions of the devices) must consider several design factors, like coverage, connectivity, lifetime, etc. However, connectivity remains the most fundamental factor especially in harsh environments. Extensive work has been applied on connectivity in WSN deployments. However, realistic physical deployment errors have been ignored in the majority of that work. In this paper, we explore an efficient grid-based deployment planning for connectivity when sensors placement is affected by random bounded errors around their corresponding grid vertices. We propose a new approach to evaluate the average connectivity percentage of the deployed sensor nodes. We apply this approach to practical 3D deployment scenario, namely, the cubic grid-based deployment with bounded uniform random errors. The average connectivity percentage is computed numerically and verified by extensive simulation results. Based on the results, quantified effects of placement errors on the connectivity percentage are outlined.