Experimental Study of Link Quality Distribution in Sensor Network Deployment for Building Environment

Monitoring and automatic control of building environment is a crucial application of wireless sensor network (WSN) in which maximizing network lifetime is a key challenge. The link quality distribution in a single floor of an indoor building environment is investigated experimentally to obtain a full coverage map. The results indicate a broad transitional region between 15 to 30m from the hub, and confirm that the transitional region is of particular concern in wireless sensor network since it accommodates high variance unreliable links. The poor link quality in the transitional region may be attributed to the many obstacles within the radio path including concrete element, brick walls, plasterboard partitions, office furniture and other items that either absorbs or reflects these radio waves leading to signal loss or multi-path effects.