Evaluation of Signal Attenuation for Bluetooth, ZigBee and Sound in Foliage

Abstract

Rural environments have been struggling to get connected due to various reasons, one of them being the fact that the signal attenuation is too high in foliage, drastically affecting range and power consumption. This study evaluates the effect of foliage in the attenuation of 2.4 GHz signals, namely Bluetooth and ZigBee. An alternate candidate signal, sound is also analyzed in a similar environment. In order to further the experiment, a simulation model using Omnet++ was created and the alpha value, which marks the environmental constant was noted. We have concluded from the study that the signal attenuation for the 2.4 GHz signals are very high in foliage. The high frequency sound signals also suffered drastic signal loss in foliage, but the low frequencies penetrated quite well. Therefore, high frequency signals are poor candidate carrier signals for such environments.