Performance Analysis of Sensor Communications for Agriculture Systems using SDR Platform

This work focuses on the wireless channel characterization for agriculture applications using a simulation based approach. Wireless channel modeling is a challenging problem for near ground communications primarily due to significant attenuation owing to the proximity to the surface of the earth. In this paper, we estimate the wireless channel coefficients and compute the RMSE to ascertain the accuracy. Using the corrected channel parameters, we characterize the BER of the wireless channel in AWGN for a BPSK communication system using a simulation based approach. We use Software Defined Radio (SDR) with GNU Radio, which is an open-source software development tool for generation of baseband signals, defining modulation formats and RF system parameters. Our results show that the corrected channel parameters from our system yield simulated BER values that are very close to the theoretical values.