Abstract
In this work, we investigate the distribution of observation signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) at sensors in the inhomogeneous sensing environments. The sensor nodes are assumed to be uniformly deployed in the sensing field, and the effects of propagation loss and shadowing loss are considered in the received SNR. The exact distributions of the observation SNRs are derived under different signal propagation scenarios. Then, some simplified distribution models, based on some well-known distributions, for the observation SNRs are proposed by using the moment matching approach. It is found that the accuracy of modeling the observation SNRs in the linear scale is not acceptable; however, by modeling the observation SNRs in the dB scale, a very good accuracy can be obtained.