A survey on underground distributed wireless sensor networks: Design & research challenges

This paper introduces the concept of design and research challenges in wireless underground distributed sensor networks. Generally WSNs play a vital role in the development of communication, sensor technologies and owned worldwide attention in recent years. The major application areas of WSNs are distributed data collection, environment monitoring, healthcare, agriculture and underground surveillance etc. Generally, the sensors used for underground communication is to perform the functionalities such as monitoring variety of conditions like soil salinity, water content and temperature for agricultural applications, environment monitoring etc. the major challenge for the designers is to establish effective communication between sensor nodes in underground like water environment soil environment etc, which is the challenging task compared to air medium. This work provides an overview of applications and design challenges for WUSNs, deployment of sensor nodes in the underground and existing, proposed methods between underground sensor nodes and above ground sensor nodes and challenges for the underground communication channel including methods for predicting path losses in an underground link.