A Tight Bound on the Maximum Interference of Random Sensors in the Highway Model

Consider $n$ sensors whose positions are represented by $n$ uniform, independent and identically distributed random variables assuming values in the open unit interval $(0,1)$. A natural way to guarantee connectivity in the resulting sensor network is to assign to each sensor as its range, the maximum of the two possible distances to its two neighbors. The interference at a given sensor is defined as the number of sensors that have this sensor within their range. In this paper we prove that the expected maximum interference of the sensors is $\Theta (\sqrt{\ln n})$.