$k$ -Coverage Estimation Problem in Heterogeneous Camera Sensor Networks With Boundary Deployment

Coverage estimation is one of the fundamental issues of camera sensor networks (CSNs), and is also an important metric used to evaluate the monitoring quality of field of interest (FoI). In comparison with conventional omnidirectional sensor networks, coverage estimation in CSNs is more challenging due to the sensing region of camera sensor that is a sector-disk region. Moreover, the heterogeneous deployment of CSNs makes the coverage estimation problem even more complex. Currently, most of the literatures assume that a great number of camera sensors are directly deployed in the FoI. This paper assumes that all heterogeneous camera sensors are stochastically deployed outside the FoI. For such heterogeneous CSNs, we derived a $k$ -coverage probabilistic expression to estimate the minimum number of camera sensors required for a desired level of $k$ -coverage. To evaluate the performance of the proposed $k$ -coverage estimation expression, several simulation experiments are conducted to validate the theoretical results.