Radio propagation in industrial wireless sensor network environments: from testbed to simulation evaluation

In recent years, sensor networks characteristics have led to incremental utilization in different types of applications. Several techniques have been proposed to evaluate the performance of WSNs; the two most popular being mathematical analysis and simulations. An important drawback of these techniques is that they provide evaluation results that usually are not similar to those of real deployments. One reason for this is the fact that both techniques introduce physical layer modeling assumptions, which do not usually corresponded to real-life environments. In this paper, we used measurements from an industrial environment to develop a new radio propagation model for use in simulators and mathematical tools. The proposed radio model was implemented in the COOJA simulator and validated against real-life results obtained from a testbed inside a running oil refinery, which were found not to conform to any legacy radio propagation model. The proposed model has been shown to successfully match the refinery testbed behavior.