Hierarchical modeling of redundancy and paths in wireless sensor networks

The main goal of wireless sensor networks is to monitor a target field and transmit surveillance data to a sink. Therefore, connectivity of the sensor network and full coverage of the monitored area are the most relevant concerns to reach these goals. In order to maintain the connectivity, we propose in this paper an hierarchical model for the wireless sensor networks deployment which consists of dividing sensors in sets of equivalent nodes. We study the effectiveness of the model under different deployment strategies: random, circular and Poisson point process distributions. We investigate the impact of deployment strategies on (i) coverage (ii) connectivity ratio and (iii) the shortest path to sink.