Comparative Analysis of RF Circuits for Interconnecting Wireless Sensor Nodes in Noisy Environments
Ilemona S Atawodi, Zhaoxian Zhou · 2023
With the advancement in IoT (Internet of Things) devices for home use and automation, access to cheaper over-the-counter microcontroller units (MCU) has led to a plethora of uses for wireless sensors in other places such as in the factories, industry, test platforms, etc. As such building the ideal solution for your specific use case requires considerations for MCU, Radio, and sensor type. These considerations are based on secondary factors like the size of the required network, source of power, and data requirements. For this experiment, our MCU of choice was the ESP32 and the RF protocols considered for this experiment were WiFi, Bluetooth Low Energy(BLE), and Zigbee. The ESP32 MCU was an ideal choice due to it being low cost and having a WiFi and Bluetooth radio inbuilt, the platform was also modular as other radios such as the XBee for ZigBee and LoRa 915Mhz could be added on if required. The experiments were a test to see how the MCU performed in environments with and without noise indoors and outdoors, the main focus was on figuring out the cut-off distance for each radio in the conditions set for the experiment. For reliability, an RSSI value of -75dBm was selected as the cutoff signal strength.