Realistic Sensing Area Modeling

Abstract

Despite the well-known fact that sensing patterns in reality are highly irregular, researchers continue to develop protocols with simplifying assumptions about the sensing. For example, a circular 0/1 sensing model is widely used in most existing simulators and analysis. While this model provides high-level guidelines, it could cause wrong estimation of system performance in the real world. In this project, we design and implement a practical Sensing Area Modeling technique, called SAM. By injecting events through regular and hierarchical training, SAM estimates the sensing areas of individual sensor nodes accurately. Especially, this work is the first to investigate the impact of irregular sensing area on application performance, such as coverage scheduling. We evaluate SAM using outdoor experiments with XSM motes, indoor experiment with 40 MicaZ motes as well as an extensive 1000-node simulation. Our evaluation results reveal serious problems caused by circular sensing model, while demonstrating significant performance improvements in major applications when SAM is used.