Distributional Substitution for Inter-Sensor Distances in Random Fields

The distance between wireless sensors in random fields is crucial for performance analysis and sensor network deployment. However, the exact distribution models are normally of great complexity and can hardly lead to closed-form analytics for most cases. In this study, we investigate the inter-sensor distance distribution in random fields, propose a polynomial inter-sensor distance distributional substitute, and develop two strategies for distributional parameter mapping for different application scenarios. Simulation results presented in this paper verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the low-complexity distributional substitution technique. The verified analyses given in this paper can help to provide mathematically tractable performance metrics for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) where sensors are randomly distributed over two-dimensional space.