Performance of Mobile Cyber-Physical Agents with Discrete Trajectories for Sensing Spatio-Temporal Variables.

In this paper, we study the performance of a cyber-physical system with agents moving according to random tra-jectories to sense an environmental variable with known spatio-temporal profile. We introduce two sensing methods to model the discrete time instants of measurements. We derive closed form expressions for the coverage probability defined as the probability that the environmental variable can be estimated at a random location within a certain tolerable error. We also derive joint coverage probability, which is the probability that a given location is covered jointly over multiple time instants. Our analysis also offers insights into the design of optimal trajectories of agents.