Challenging Wireless Networks, an Underground Experience

Quite often Wireless Ad-hoc networks are taken for granted as a networking solution in the most challenging environments. Motivated by these networks’ self-X properties and the infrastructure-less paradigm, many authors rely on Ad-hoc networks to support a number of applications in remote areas or even in disaster scenarios such as mine collapses, earthquakes, tunnel accidents. However, most of these works are only simulation oriented, disregarding how challenging wireless networks can be in such scenarios. By conducting a set of performance measurements with off-the-shelf netbooks in an underground environment it is possible to see that typical wireless simulation assumptions do not verify, and that covering an area with multi-hop connectivity is not straightforward. These results motivate a tighter interaction between real experiments and future simulation based works in challenging environments which need to be more accurate.