Impact of physical layer design on the deployment of a sensor network with correlated observations

Abstract

We consider a sensor network which observes a spatially correlated random field. The Slepian-Wolf scheme is known to help reduce the transmission requirement in such a scenario. We seek a "good" operating point for this network, in order to maximize the information gathered with a constraint on the network budget (which includes the number of nodes and their transmission powers). We present a comparative study of the system performance obtained under various transmission/reception schemes and fading coefficient statistics. Finally, we study the optimal density of the sensor network.