Universal information coverage for bandwidth-constrained sensor networks

In this paper, we argue that the notion of information coverage is a simple model and it is assumed that sensor measurements can be perfectly transmitted to the leader node. This scheme is impractical for implementation in a bandwidth-constrained sensor network. Because of the bandwidth and energy constraints, sensor measurements are first quantized into discrete messages, and then transmitted to the leader node for a final estimate. Inspired by this idea, we propose a notion of universal information coverage based on a universal decentralized estimation scheme in a bandwidth-constrained sensor network. We analyze its some properties and illustrate density requirements for deterministic sensor deployment compared with information coverage. The results and examples show that the notion of universal information coverage has a more realistic and accurate estimation for coverage performance in a bandwidth-constrained sensor network.