CSN: The Heat Equation

We have proposed Computational Sensor Networks as a methodology1 to exploit models of physical phenomena in order to better understand the structure of the sensor network. To do so, it is necessary to relate changes in the sensed variables (e.g., temperature) to the aspect of interest in the sensor network (e.g., sensor node position, sensor bias, etc.), and to develop a computational method for its solution. As examples, we describe the use of the heat equation to solve the sensor node localization problem and to detect sensor bias. Simulation and physical experiments are described.