A comparison of radioelectric propagation in mature forests at wireless network frequency bands

The improvement in terms of battery life and low consumption devices drives the growing development of wireless sensor networks. The main problem of deploying a wireless sensor network is the deficit of propagation studies in 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz bands in a peer to peer configuration at forests. These studies are necessary to perform an estimation of the range coverage, in order to optimize the distance between devices in an actual network deployment. Two propagation studies are presented. A lot of measured received power samples were collected in two forest environments around different trees, in order to obtain a general propagation equation for these ambiances. Finally, an estimation of the minimum number of network devices necessary to cover a fixed area is presented.