Quantifying sensing coverage and data delivery delay in mobile sensor networks

In mobile wireless sensor networks where sensor nodes are general mobile terminals equipped by vehicles and pedestrians, it is difficult for applications to estimate coverages of sensor nodes due to their mobility. In addition, when a network is sparse, it is also difficult to estimate delivery delays of sensor readings to the sink node(s) because delays depend on both the distribution of nodes and the change of the network topology. These two factors, sensing coverages and data delivery delays, are very significant when designing applications and underlying protocols. In this paper, we aim to quantify sensing coverages and data delivery delays in mobile sensor networks. We propose several general metrics to quantify these two factors for a given mobility pattern. We also report results of some simulation experiments that measure the proposed metrics assuming several typical mobility models.