IEEE 802.15.4 performance evaluation for the underground mine radio-channel

Abstract

In this paper, the effect of the radio-channel in underground mines on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is evaluated through the simulation of the ZigBee/IEEE 802.15.4 physical layer. Since the IEEE 802.15.4 standard has no specification for channel equalization, existing techniques for equalizing multipath fading channels are used. This improves performance in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER) and Frame Error Rate (FER).