Modeling and Simulation of WSNs for Agriculture Applications Using Dynamic Transmit Power Control Algorithm

Simulation platforms have become important tools in the design and evaluating of protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks. Thus the use of realistic models in simulation is important for the development of protocols. However, most of the reported studies based on simulations tend to use simple or non-realistic parameters and assumptions. This paper proposes a transmit power control algorithm with a realistic radio energy model based on different propagation models to mimic different deployment scenarios. Results show that the implementation of transmit power control extends the network lifetime by 5.3% when free space path loss model is used. However, a greater efficiency of 8.7% is achieved when the network is assumed to be deployed in the presence of vegetation using Weissberger´s vegetation attenuation model.