Exposure In Wireless Ad-Hoc Sensor Networks
Seapahn Meguerdichian1, Farinaz Koushanfar2, Gang Qu3, Miodrag Potkonjak1

Abstract

Wireless ad-hoc sensor networks will provide one of
the missing connections between the Internet and the physical
world. One of the fundamental problems in sensor networks
is the calculation of coverage. Exposure is directly
related to coverage in that it is a measure of how well an
object, moving on an arbitrary path, can be observed by the
sensor network over a period of time.

In addition to the informal definition, we formally define
exposure and study its properties. We have developed
an efficient and effective algorithm for exposure calculation
in sensor networks, specifically for finding minimal exposure
paths. The minimal exposure path provides valuable
information about the worst case exposure-based coverage
in sensor networks. The algorithm works for any given distribution
of sensors, sensor and intensity models, and characteristics
of the network. It provides an unbounded level of
accuracy as a function of run time and storage. We provide
an extensive collection of experimental results and study the
scaling behavior of exposure and the proposed algorithm for
its calculation.