How Environmental Factors Impact Outdoor Sensor Networks: A Case Study

How do the characteristics of the surrounding environment affect the ability of the nodes of a wireless sensor network (WSN) to communicate? Partial answers to this question can be found in the literature, but always with a focus on the short-term, small-scale behavior of individual links, as this directly informs the design of WSN protocols. In this paper, we are instead concerned with the large scale behavior of the overall network, observed over a longer time scale, as our primary interest is to support the deployment of WSNs by characterizing the impact of the target environment. Motivated by a real-world wildlife monitoring application, we report about experimental campaigns in three outdoor environments characterized by varying degrees of vegetation. Experiments are repeated in summer and winter, to account for seasonal variations, and span multiple days, allowing us to assess variations induced by the succession of day and night. Our experiments focus primarily on characterizing...