Understanding Link Feature of Wireless Sensor Networks in Outdoor Space: A Measurement Study

Existing works in wireless sensor networks exploit many theoretical assumptions of transmission links. However, in practical system, these assumptions are more complicated and even could not hold for the unexpected impact from the extraneous factors. In this article, we conduct a comprehensive measurement study in the real application to observe, verify, discover and model the feature of transmission link with outdoor environment factors in wireless sensor networks. We design a large scale measurement system to continuously monitor the link transmission in a forest. According to more than 10 million records [2], we analyze and obtain several observations such as the RSSI and its correlation model on pair-link, bursty link in bursty mode, RSSI with environment factors, etc. These observations provides a guideline for better design of new upper-layer algorithms and protocols in sensor applications.