Sensing Coverage for Wireless Sensor Networks in Shadowed Rician Fading Environments

The effect of shadowing and multipath fading on sensing coverage has been studied in this paper. Rician fading is one of the most widely occurring type of multipath fading. We model the multipath fading by Rician random distribution under LOS propagation conditions with shadowing for the first time. We study the coverage aspect for wireless sensor network in the presence of shadowing and Rician fading. We find that the increasing standard deviation of shadowing and Rician fading has a profound negative impact on the sensing coverage. We note a decreasing trend in the sensing coverage with an increase in both shadowing and multipath Rician fading. The decrease of sensing coverage in our study is compared with the case of shadowing alone. Also, multiple deployment of nodes is demonstrated in which we observe a reduction in the no. of nodes required for sensing coverage.