Novel ns-3 model enabling simulation of electromagnetic wireless underground networks

Wireless Underground Networks (WUNs) have applications such as agriculture, border surveillance, maintenance of playing fields, and infrastructure monitoring. When designing a sensor network for one of these applications some of the sensors (communication nodes) will be buried underground, which means the propagation medium will be the soil or hybrid (air plus soil) in case of one of the nodes is aboveground. Thus, new models have to be implemented in existing simulators, in order to enable the proper simulation of these communications scenarios. This paper presents a new model, named underground model, and discusses its integration into the ns-3 simulator. The underground model enables the simulation of WUNs, including network topologies with underground and aboveground nodes. The accuracy of the underground model is shown for two frequency bands by comparing simulations results with experimental results.