Near ground path gain measurements at 433/868/915/2400 MHz in indoor corridor for wireless sensor networks

Near to ground radio frequency (RF) propagation path gain (PG) measurements at short distances at antenna height of 50 cm from the ground/floor were made in typical narrow and wide straight indoor corridors at 433/868/915/2400 MHz in a modern multi-storied building. The measurement was performed utilizing RF equipment and comparisons were made with Matlab simulations of ray tracing technique, free space model and ITU-R model along with Full-3D ray tracing model of Wireless Insite (WI) software. Measured PG values showed good agreement with WI in all cases. Path loss exponent (PE) values ranging from 1.22 to 2.13 were observed from the measured data. The research work reported in this paper is predominately geared towards characterizing radio link for wireless sensor networks in typical indoor corridor environments.