  A recently conducted indoor-to-outdoor measurement campaign for investigating
the propagation characteristics of an $8 \times 8$ virtual
multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) based wireless sensor network (WSN) is
presented in this paper. The campaign is conducted in an instrumentation room
devoid of windows, but filled with different noisy electrical and measuring
units. The channel impulse responses are reported when a 20 MHz wide signal is
transmitted at 2.53 GHz. Measurements are collected for 15 different spatial
combinations of the transmit antennas. After analyzing the collected data,
system capacity and achievable transmission rates are calculated for each
measurement scenario. Using these values, we examined the best configuration
for positioning the sensors that can maximize overall network throughput.
Results demonstrated that distributing sensors on all 4 walls of the room can
achieve the highest possible information rate.
