A Survey of RF-Propagation Simulation Tools for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks are applied in new applications all the time. However, in many cases their performance in a particular application is not be evaluated until the deployment phase. This is often too late and causes extra work and iterations in the design of the network hardware or communication parameters. This can be reduced with careful study before the actual deployment using modeling and simulation tools for testing and optimizing the sensor network beforehand. In this paper we introduce three simulation tools for radio frequency (RF) propagation and estimate their suitability for modeling and simulation of sensor networks. According to the results, we see them as very efficient tools, but also suggest improvements for even more versatile results.