TerrainLOS: An Outdoor Propagation Model for Realistic Sensor Network Simulation

We present TerrainLOS, an outdoor propagation model that uses Digital Elevation Models to determine whether two nodes can communicate. We have implemented TerrainLOS in the sensor network simulator COOJA and used it to evaluate how the roughness of terrain, which we classify using Average Cumulative Visibility, affects the number of edges, connectedness, latency, and power of a network. We compare the difference in results when using TerrainLOS and a simpler propagation model to show how the performance of outdoor simulation is greatly affected by a model that takes terrain into account.