RF Propagation Simulation in Sensor Networks

Itpsilas rare that real-world sensor network deployments confirm the academic assumptions that are made regarding uniformly, or randomly, distributed nodes and their node-pair signal strength measurements. During simulation time, these assumptions have grave affects on network initialization time, end-to-end delay, number of connections per node, network depth, throughput and so on. This paper introduces a simple RF propagation model that accurately predicts peer-to-peer connectivity based on signal strength. We show that network simulations based on this model agree favorably with real-world deployments.