Motivation

A number of research works have been made in the past few years regarding wireless underground communications because they revealed to be a good alternative to wired solutions. However, the propagation medium is the soil, the communications properties vary from soil to soil, and the amount of water also has significant influence in the propagation; for instance, the medium characteristics will vary a lot with weather conditions.

In order to overcome the difficulties to design a network of this type we need to be able to simulate the target network for several scenarios. Then, with the results we can determine, for example, the minimum distance between nodes that can guarantee connectivity between nodes for different amounts of water in the soil. Also, before doing field experiments, new wireless underground networking solutions need to be evaluated in simulations, for the sake of easy control of the tests. These difficulties in design a network are mainly due to the non-existence of simulators for these scenarios.

The Ns-3 will be the simulator chosen for implement the simulation environment for underground networks because it is widely used by the research community including our research group. This implementation in a network simulator is an important step when designing new networking solutions for this environment and also for research purposes.