A Study of Radio Signal Behaviors in Complex Environments

This paper presents a study of how radio signal behaves in complex environments where the effects of reflections and obstructions are taken into consideration. We collect the RSSI data of each environment and use an objective metric to evaluate the experimental result. The base metric that is used for evaluations is the radio signal strength behavior in an open flat area that is free from reflections and obstructions. We reveal that radio signal strength does not work well in all indoor and complex outdoor environments that are selected for experiment purposes, due to the effects of reflections and obstructions. Radio signal strength only correlates with distance in unobstructed outdoor environment. We also demonstrate that the elevation of sensor nodes can reduces the reflections and obstructions effects, both indoors and outdoors.