A Cost-Efficient Approach to Wireless Sensor Network Design

This study presents a general flexible approach for the design of wireless sensor network under the random deployment mechanism. The cost of sensing and communications is incorporated into the design of the network, while in addition allowing for unreliable sensors. In the proposed approach, cost is treated generically and can correspond to either a fixed acquisition cost, or an operational cost or a combination of both. The main objective is to minimize the overall network cost, while enforcing the coverage and connectivity constraints. The proposed approach should be regarded as part of any feasibility study during the planning stages for the deployment of a wireless sensor network, when decisions about its capabilities and cost are considered. An additional technical contribution is the derivation of a new simple bound on the probability of a network being connected, which exhibits a very good performance in simulations and unlike existing ones is shown to be better suited for network design studies.