Location errors in wireless embedded sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks monitor the physical world by taking measurements of physical phenomena. Those measurements, and consequently the results computed from the measurements, may be significantly inaccurate. Therefore, in order to properly design and use wireless sensor networks, one must develop methods that take error sources, error propagation through optimization software, and ultimately their impact on applications, into consideration. In this paper, we focus on location discovery induced errors. We have selected location discovery as the object of our case study since essentially all sensor network computation and communication tasks are dependent on geographical node location data. First, we model the error in input parameters of the location discovery process. Then, we study the impact of errors on three selected applications: exposure, best- and worst-case coverage, and shortest path routing. Furthermore, we examine how the choice of a specific objective function optimized during the location discovery process impacts the errors in results of different applications.