A novel computational model for electromagnetic propagation through corn fields is proposed. For each corn plant a very simple, yet efficient representation is utilized, i.e. a dielectric cylinder surrounding a perfectly conducting wire lying on its axis. The entire corn field model is created by placing copies of the prototype plant model in a rectangular, row-column pattern, whereas an adjacent infinite, lossy dielectric slab stands for the ground. The resulting combination of soil and corn plants is imported to a commercial computational software tool simulating the wave propagation by means of the Moment Method. To support the prediction data for the signal attenuation, actual measurements are taken in a real corn field, using a ZigBee receiver-transmitter system. Measurements and computations are performed for various plant heights, and comparisons between the two sets of data proves surprisingly good, meaning that even a naïve geometric representation of the corn plants may lead to adequate accuracy in predictions of the wave propagation.

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