The operating terrain, in which wireless sensor networks are deployed to function, has a potentially significant impact on the network performance. This is due to the inherent non-ideal channel conditions present in the operating environment such as multipath, noise and propagation delays. However, most simulations ignore these non-idealities thus yielding very optimistic results. This paper incorporates channel non-idealities such as propagation delays into a simulated wireless sensor network, and evaluates the effect on network performance. Given their inherent wideband characteristic, which makes them robust to non-ideal conditions such as multipath, chaos-based modulation schemes are a possible alternative to conventional spread spectrum techniques. By incorporating these non-ideal conditions, and evaluating the network performance when deployed in non-terrestrial terrains such as underwater acoustic localization, this paper contributes a more realistic simulation framework of the sensor network performance using the metrics of throughput and end-end delay, and a comparison of the results when different chaos modulation schemes are applied is presented.
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