Measurement and Characterization of Link Quality for IEEE 802.15.4-Compliant Wireless Sensor Networks in Vehicular Communications

Abstract

IEEE 802.15.4 is a promising standard that can provide efficient communication quality at low cost and low data rates. This standard has been studied for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V-I) communication in wireless sensor network (WSN)-based vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) applications. To adopt this standard for vehicular communications, link quality metrics must be investigated for topology design and network optimization. In this study, a series of measurements were made with IEEE 802.15.4 radios to identify wireless channel characteristics with regard to antenna height, vehicle velocity, and distance in various vehicular scenarios. The empirical behavior of link communication quality was also investigated in terms of received signal strength, packet error rate (PER), and packet loss distribution (PLD). The empirically measured and experimental results, which have been validated through appropriate analytical modeling, provide valuable insights, as well as guide design decisions and tradeoffs for WSN-based VANET applications.