Using event detection latency to evaluate the coverage of a wireless sensor network

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of many tiny and low-power devices deployed in a sensing field. One of the major tasks of a WSN is to monitor the surrounding environment and to detect events occurring in the sensing field. Given an event appearing in a WSN, the event detection latency is to model the time that it takes for the WSN to be aware of the event. In this work, we analyze the latency using a probabilistic approach under an any-sensor-detection and a k-sensor-detection models, where k > 1 is an integer. Such an analysis can be used as an index to evaluate a WSN’s coverage and thus can help guide the deployment of a WSN. We also develop simulations to verify our analytical results.