Channel Measurements of an Indoor Office Scenario for Wireless Sensor Applications

Ad-hoc networks and sensor networks, where nodes communicate with each other without fixed infrastructure, are of great importance for many industrial, environmental, and safety-related applications. The fading statistics of the propagation channels between sensor nodes are essential to determine the possible data rate, outage, and latency of sensor networks. In this paper, we present results from a recent measurement campaign that for the first time provides an in-depth analysis of the propagation channels between typical sensor node locations in office environments. We analyze the Rice factor as a function of distance and find that it is not a monotonically decreasing function. Even in pure LOS situations, Rice factors are on the order of 10 or less. This has important consequences for analysis of bit error rates, diversity order, and diversity/multiplexing tradeoff in clustered sensor networks.