Diffusion-based Approach to Deploying Wireless Sensors to Satisfy Coverage, Connectivity and Reliability

An important objective of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is to reliably sense data about the environment in which they are deployed. Reliability in WSNs has been widely studied in terms of providing reliable routing protocols for message dissemination and reliability of communication from sink to sensors. In this work, we define a reliability metric by the amount of information sensed by the network. In order to satisfy this reliability constraint, we propose a diffusion-based approach for a deployment pattern for the sensor nodes. We show that this deployment pattern while maintaining reliable network operation for the entire duration of deployment satisfies coverage and connectivity constraints for the network. In addition, we show that this diffusion-based deployment pattern requires lesser number of sensors and provides higher degree of reliability of sensing operation than popular regular deployment patterns.