Research Output
Signal propagation analysis for low data rate wireless sensor network applications in sport grounds and on roads
Signal propagation in aquaculture environment for wireless sensor network applications
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Publication
This paper presents results of a study to characterise wire- less point-to-point channel for wireless sensor networks applications in sport hard court arenas, grass fields and on roads. Antenna height and orientation effects on coverage are also studied and results show that for omni-directional patch antenna, node range is reduced by a factor of 2 when the antenna orientation is changed from vertical to horizontal. The maximum range for a wireless node on a hard court sport arena has been determined to be 70m for 0dBm transmission but this reduces to 60m on a road surface and to 50m on a grass field. For horizontal antenna orientation the range on the road is longer than on the sport court which shows that scattered signal components from the rougher road surface combine to extend the communication range. The channels investigated showed that packet error ratio (PER) is dominated by large-scale, rather than small-scale, channel fading with an abrupt transition from low PER to 100% PER. Results also show that large-scale received signal power can be modeled with a 2nd or der log-distance polynomial equation on the sport court and road, but a 1st order model is sufficient for the grassfield. Small-scale signal variations have been found to have a Rice distribution for signal to noise ratio levels greater than 10 dB but the Rice K-factor exhibits significant variations at short distances which can be attributed to the influence of strong ground reflections.
Publication
This paper presents results of signal propagation studies for wireless sensor network planning in aquaculture environment for water quality and changes in water characteristics monitoring. Some water pollutants can cause widespread damage to marine life within a very short time period and thus wireless sensor network reliability is more critical than in crop farming. This paper shows that network coverage models and assumptions over land do not readily apply in tropical aquaculture environment where high temperatures are experienced during the day. More specifically, due to high humidity caused by evaporation, network coverage at 15 cm antenna height is better than at 5 m antenna heights due to the presence of a superrefraction (ducting) layer. For a 69 m link, the difference between the signal strength measured over several days is more than 7 dBm except under anomaly conditions. In this environment, the two-ray model has been found to provide high accuracy for signal propagation over water where there are no objects in close proximity to the propagation path. However, with vegetation in close proximity, accurate signal variation predication must consider contributions from scattered and diffused components, taking into account frequency selective fading characteristics to represent the temporal and spatial signal variations.