Effect of environmental parameters on long range Wi-Fi connectivity

Typically, marine fishermen take 5–7 days for a single fishing trip. They travel 40–120 km away from the shore. There is no viable communication technology available currently to keep them connected to the shore while they are gone. We have successfully developed and prototyped a marine communication network based on a multi-level point to multipoint backhaul architecture using Long Range (LR) Wi-Fi technology. We conducted sea trials both at 5.8 GHz and 2.4 GHz and got better results at 2.4 GHz. We achieved a range of 60+ km using an intermediate hop during our field trials at Arabian Sea. The channel quality over the marine waters is likely to experience fading due to multiple factors such as undulations of the boat due to variation in sea state, reflection from the sea surface, variation in environmental conditions such as temperature, relative humidity, etc. Understanding the effect of various parameters will help in building an accurate propagation model and estimating the characteristics of the network such as range, data rate, etc. It will also help in the control of transmission parameters such as power, antenna height, type and gain, frequency, etc. This work presents the analysis of the results obtained from the study of the effect of environmental parameters on the propagation characteristics of a LR Wi-Fi link set up over the backwaters of Arabian Sea. The experiments were conducted at both 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz.