A novel realistic irregular radio model to enhance coverage evaluation in wireless sensor networks

The obstacles in the transmission path, the non-isotropic antennas and the impact of environmental phenomena in WSNs may result to unreliable and unpredicted radio transmission, and therefore affect the evaluation of applications which specifically require high coverage and connectivity. Such an issue is known by radio irregularity which greatly impacts algorithms performing under simplistic radio models. In order to control this phenomenon, this paper proposes a novel realistic irregular radio model. The main goal of this model is reflecting the real behavior of radio transmission in WSN regarding the main causes affecting the radio propagation. A set of simulation experiments were conducted to validate and evaluate the proposed irregular radio model.