Statistical channel model for wireless sensor networks deployment in suburban environment

Recently, unattended near ground sensor networks are attracting increasing attention for many applications due to their ability to monitor various physical parameters such as temperature, pressure, etc. Deployment of wireless sensor networks in urban environments is one of the foundations of the smart city concept, allowing transfer of huge amounts of data between users. The knowledge of the path loss between proximate sensor nodes is crucial for designing the network architecture and for evaluating its performance. In this paper we focus on deployment of unattended wireless sensors in a suburban environment, where multipath and shadowing phenomena are dominant. We investigate the propagation channel by the Shooting and Bouncing Rays technique, which includes the vector data in a suburban environment. The simulations are validated by field measurements using a 2.4 GHz IEEE 802.15.4 ZigBee RF transceiver. The good agreement found between ray-tracing simulations and field measurements, allows us to develop a pathloss log-distance statistical channel model. Furthermore, this work enables the evaluation of the nominal distance between the sensors and the possible interferences between adjacent sensor nodes needed for designing the network architecture.