Abstract-How do the characteristics of the surrounding environment affect the ability of the nodes of a wireless sensor network (WSN) to communicate?Partial answers to this question can be found in the literature, but always with a focus on the short-term, small-scale behavior of individual links, as this directly informs the design of WSN protocols. In this paper, we are instead concerned with the largescale behavior of the overall network, observed over a longer time scale, as our primary interest is to support the deployment of WSNs by characterizing the impact of the target environment.Motivated by a real-world wildlife monitoring application, we report about experimental campaigns in three outdoor environments characterized by varying degrees of vegetation. Experiments are repeated in summer and winter, to account for seasonal variations, and span multiple days, allowing us to assess variations induced by the succession of day and night. Our experiments focus primarily on characterizing the impact of the environment on the physical layer, but we also investigate how this is mirrored at higher layers. We analyze the experimental data along multiple dimensions, yielding quantitative answers to the aforementioned question, and eliciting trends and findings previously not reported in the literature. We argue that this type of study may inspire new methods to better estimate the performance of a WSN in its target deployment environment.

Unlike other fields of computing and communications, low-power wireless networking is plagued by one major issue: the absence of a well-defined, agreed-upon yardstick to compare the performance of systems, namely, a benchmark. We argue that this situation may eventually represent a hampering factor for a technology expected to be key in the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-physical Systems (CPS). This paper describes a recent initiative to remedy this situation, seeking to enlarge the participation from the community.

This paper presents the LoRaWAN at the Edge Dataset (LoED), an open LoRaWAN packet dataset collected at gateways. Real-world LoRaWAN datasets are important for repeatable sensor-network and communications research and evaluation as, if carefully collected, they provide realistic working assumptions. LoED data is collected from nine gateways over a four month period in a dense urban environment. The dataset contains packet header information and all physical layer properties reported by gateways such as the CRC, RSSI, SNR and spreading factor. Files are provided to analyse the data and get aggregated statistics. The dataset is available at: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4048321 CCS CONCEPTS • Networks → Link-layer protocols; • Computer systems organization → Embedded and cyber-physical systems.

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Assessing the connectivity of Wireless Sensor Networks in the specific environment in which they are deployed is crucial to develop reliable system services and understand their behavior. In this demo, we introduce TRIDENT, a tool that measures communication with an untethered infrastructure. It enables the execution of connectivity experiments "in the wild", supporting also the sharing of the gathered results.