Snow covered forest channel modeling for near-ground Wireless Sensor Networks

Through an intensive measurement campaign, this paper investigates propagation loss on snow covered terrain for near ground Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Here, we measure near ground path-loss and shadowing effects in a dense forest accumulated with snow of 60cm thickness at 2.45 GHz center frequency. These effects were studied by placing antennas at three different heights: 0 cm (buried inside the snow and on ground surface), 35 cm (partially buried in the snow), and 60 cm (located on the top of snow surface). Measurements were repeated for line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS (NLOS) scenarios.