Modeling Interference for Wireless Sensor Network Simulators

Any radio signal gets exposed to some attenuation over distance, and is received at the receiver as its distorted version and is superposed with other wireless signals transmitted in the neighborhood. In wireless communications, the useful signal is usually decoded by assuming the sum of all other wireless signal transmissions as noise. Interference between coexisting transmissions can cause severe performance degradation in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper we have reviewed interference models for wireless sensor networks. Since a decade or more, densification of networks increases the impact of interference. New models have been proposed but are not yet included into network simulators. This could be source of a big difference between simulations and real deployments.