Practical RSSI long distance measurement evaluation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Distance measurement between neighboring nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is a rudimentary requirement for localization and position estimation algorithms. Common techniques exploit the signal strength to estimate the distance between two nodes. Although this has been widely accepted in research during the last two decades, practical evaluations of these techniques in outdoor scenarios under realistic conditions are rare. In this paper we evaluate distance measurement based on the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) under different conditions to analyze the quality and precision in real-world environments.