In this paper, we consider clustered unmanned vehicle (UV) sensor networks for swarm sensing applications in a linear structure such as highway, tunnel, underwater pipelines, power lines, and international border. We assume that the linear UV sensor networks follow Thomas cluster process (TCP), in which the cluster locations are modelled by Poisson point process (PPP), while the cluster members (UVs) are normally distributed around their cluster centers. We focus on communications between UVs within a cluster such as local sensing data transfer or swarm coordination, where multiple UV pairs can share the same frequency band simultaneously. Thus, in the presence of co-channel interference both from the same cluster and the other clusters, we study the coverage and area spectral efficiency of the clustered UV sensor networks in a linear topology.
Keywords: cluster process; coverage; linear sensor networks; spectral efficiency; unmanned vehicle.