We consider a wireless sensor network, sampling a bandlimited field,
described by a limited number of harmonics. Sensor nodes are irregularly
deployed over the area of interest or subject to random motion; in addition
sensors measurements are affected by noise. Our goal is to obtain a high
quality reconstruction of the field, with the mean square error (MSE) of the
estimate as performance metric. In particular, we analytically derive the
performance of several reconstruction/estimation techniques based on linear
filtering. For each technique, we obtain the MSE, as well as its asymptotic
expression in the case where the field number of harmonics and the number of
sensors grow to infinity, while their ratio is kept constant. Through numerical
simulations, we show the validity of the asymptotic analysis, even for a small
number of sensors. We provide some novel guidelines for the design of sensor
networks when many parameters, such as field bandwidth, number of sensors,
reconstruction quality, sensor motion characteristics, and noise level of the
measures, have to be traded off
