Link Investigation of IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless Sensor Networks in Forests

Wireless sensor networks are expected to automatically monitor the ecological evolution and wildlife habits in forests. Low-power links (transceivers) are often adopted in wireless sensor network applications, in order to save the precious sensor energy and then achieve long-term, unattended monitor...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2016-07, Vol.16 (7), p.987-987
Main Authors: Ding, Xingjian, Sun, Guodong, Yang, Gaoxiang, Shang, Xinna
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Climate change
Communication
Ecological monitoring
End users
Energy consumption
forest monitoring
Forests
Indicators
Investigations
link performance
Links
low-power wireless link
Obstacles
Remote sensors
Sensors
Signal strength
Wireless communication
Wireless networks
Wireless sensor networks
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Summary:Wireless sensor networks are expected to automatically monitor the ecological evolution and wildlife habits in forests. Low-power links (transceivers) are often adopted in wireless sensor network applications, in order to save the precious sensor energy and then achieve long-term, unattended monitoring. Recent research has presented some performance characteristics of such low-power wireless links under laboratory or outdoor scenarios with less obstacles, and they have found that low-power wireless links are unreliable and prone to be affected by the target environment. However, there is still less understanding about how well the low-power wireless link performs in real-world forests and to what extent the complex in-forest surrounding environments affect the link performances. In this paper, we empirically evaluate the low-power links of wireless sensors in three typical different forest environments. Our experiment investigates the performance of the link layer compatible with the IEEE 802.15.4 standard and analyzes the variation patterns of the packet reception ratio (PRR), the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) and the link quality indicator (LQI) under diverse experimental settings. Some observations of this study are inconsistent with or even contradict prior results that are achieved in open fields or relatively clean environments and thus, provide new insights both into effectively evaluating the low-power wireless links and into efficiently deploying wireless sensor network systems in forest environments.
ISSN:1424-8220
1424-8220
DOI:10.3390/s16070987