Node Deployment by Stochastic Point Processes in Wireless Sensor Networks

Node deployment plays an important role in the design of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Many important properties such as coverage, connectivity, data fidelity and lifetime are directed influenced by the way nodes are placed in the sensor field. In this work we show that the use of a stochastic point process, namely the C model, is able to increase the network lifetime by addressing the “energy hole” problem. Among the C model properties, this process can be easily simulated and, for any number of nodes in arbitrary areas, it is able to describe situations that range from deterministic (regular) placement of nodes to clusters of sensors in a small region. The model is herein described and is assessed in terms of the coverage, connectivity, data fidelity and lifetime by using computer simulation. In particular, we compare the C process with the mostly used deployment strategy, namely the uniform randomly placement (URP), being the latter a particular case of the former.