Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are used in many industrial and consumer applications that are increasingly gaining impact in our day to day lives. Still great efforts are needed towards the definition of methodologies for their effective management. One big issue is themonitoring of the network status, which requires the definition of the performance indicators and methodologies and should be accurate and not intrusive at the same time. In this paper, we present a new process for the monitoring of the physical layer in WSNs making use of a completely passive methodology. From data sniffed by external nodes, we first estimate the position of the nodes by applying the Weighted Least Squares (WLS) to the method of indirect observations. The resulting node positions are then used to estimate the status of the communication links using the most appropriate propagation model. We performed a significant number of measurements on the field in both indoor and outdoor environments. From the experiments, we were able to achieve an accurate estimation of the channel links status with an average error lower than 1 dB, which is around 5 dB lower than the error introduced without the application of the proposed method.
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