  The performance of a wireless sensor network (WSN) depends fundamentally on
how its various parameters are configured under different link quality
conditions. Surprisingly, even though WSNs have been extensively researched,
there still lacks an in-depth understanding on how parameter configurations
affect, in particular jointly, the performance under different link quality
conditions. To fill the gap, this paper presents an extensive experimental
study on the performance of a wireless sensor network link, where measurement
data of more than 200 million packets were collected. Different from existing
work, we consider major parameters from different layers together and measure
their joint effects on key performance metrics under an extensive set of
parameter configurations. Based on the large amount of measurement data, we
investigate the impacts of these parameters and their joint configurations on
the performance, introduce empirical models to theoretically reason the
impacts, discuss implications of the obtained results, and suggest practical
guidelines for parameter configurations. Through these, a comprehensive
overview of parameter configuration impacts on the erformance is provided,
which provides new insights on wireless link performance in WSNs.
