Impact of radio propagation in buildings on WSN´s lifetime

Nowadays, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are a commonly used technology in Smart Buildings applications. Generally, WSN suffer from finite energy resources (limited lifetime), and limited network coverage (due to transmission range). The most consistent works on energy consumption and radio transmission modeling for WSN, are not taking into account realistic constraints. However, radio propagation is affected by a lot of kinds of obstacles (walls, windows, doors...) with different effects on the radio propagations. For this, a proper and more realistic radio propagation model is essential to optimize energy consumption and ensure network reliability (best network coverage). In this paper, we investigate the impact of the radio propagation modeling on the network energy consumption with and without obstacles (walls) consideration. This work leads to evaluate a proper radio behavior model with the objective to use it in an optimization process.