A route construction based on measured characteristics of radio propagation in wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, there are many constraints on electrical power and communication since sensor nodes have limited resources. Therefore, it is important to construct an effective communication route in terms of energy-efficiency and quality of communication. Many studies have been conducted to address this issue. In particular, controlling the transmission power of each node has been one of the hottest issues in recent years. Most conventional studies have assumed an environment in which radio signals transmitted by nodes propagate equally in all directions. However, this model cannot be applied to real environments due to several effects such as the presence of obstacles and antenna characteristics. In this paper, we propose a route construction method based on the measured characteristics of radio propagation in a real environment. Our method first measures the characteristics of radio propagation for all radio links. Second, the transmission power of each node and a communication route from the node to the sink node are determined based on the measured characteristics. In addition, we conduct experiments to verify that our methods can construct effective communication routes in terms of energy-efficiency and quality of communication.