WLAN IEEE 802.11b/g/n Coverage Study for Rural Areas

Abstract

With the boost of precision agriculture, Wi-Fi products have become very relevant due to their broad range of connectivity options. Nowadays, technology can improve many facets of farming practice by collecting data, such as weather conditions or soil quality. Moreover, they can better control the output of the production which would enhance business efficiency and lead to higher revenues. However, the lack of collated experimental data difficult the development of prediction procedures to determine the effects of vegetation in radio coverage. In this paper, an empiric radio coverage model for WLAN outdoor in agriculture scenarios is presented. This model is based on the free field propagation equation, taking into account the losses due to vegetation. To do this, experimental data was collected at an orange tree plantation. We measured the effects when there are trees, near the trees and far from the trees in order to compare the signal losses. Our experiments provided us the equation given by the signal losses in an orange tree plantation, which could be very useful for designing Wireless Sensor Networks in precision agriculture.