Vegetation Attenuation Measurements and Modeling in Plantations for Wireless Sensor Network Planning

Abstract—As wireless communication moves from long to short ranges with considerably lower antenna heights, the need to understand and be able to predict the impact of vegetation on coverage and quality of wireless services has become very important. This paper focuses on vegetation attenuation measurements for frequencies in the range 0.4–7.2 GHz in mango and oil palm plantations to evaluate vegetation attenuation models for application in wireless sensor network planning and deployment in precision agriculture. Although a number of models have been proposed and evaluated for specific frequencies, results show that these models do not perform well when applied to different vegetation types or at different frequencies. A global assessment of the models using a broad range of frequencies shows that the COST 235 model gives more consistent results when there is vegetation in the propagation path. For grid-like plantation, the study shows that the RET model provides the best prediction of path loss for measurements between two rows of trees. However, taking into account