We observe that low-power wireless links have non-trivial time-scaling characteristics at both the physical- and link-layers. Packet reception rate (PRR) analysis shows that links are bursty rather than constant, i.e., their reception quality varies greatly from the overall packet reception rate at different times. Furthermore, this variation is seen at many timescales. We provide a possible explanation for burstiness using wavelet analysis of RSSI traces from a variety of wireless links. We show that these traces can be considered as consistent with statistical self-similarity but not with long range dependence. Using the variance in RSSI, we suggest a way to easily characterize when scaling occurs. Finally, while current simulators do not capture scaling, we propose and validate a possible modeling technique for network links that conforms to scaling phenomena.

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