A framework for QoI-inspired analysis for sensor network deployment planning

The quality of information (QoI) that sensor networks provide to the applications they support is an important design goal for their deployment and use. In this paper, we introduce a layered framework for QoI-centered evaluation of sensor network deployment. The layered framework allows decomposing the deployment evaluation in three steps: input pre-processing, core analysis, and result post-processing. The layering allows the creation of a rich, modular toolkit for QoI-centered analysis that can accommodate both existing and new system modeling and analysis techniques. We demonstrate the utility of the framework by comparing the QoI performance of finite-sized sensor networks with general deployment topology. We also derive some new analysis results for the class of applications considered herein.