Network planning is an important task in wireless communications, as it helps network operators avoid unnecessary costs. In the context of the internet of things, using long-range wide-area network technologies in the Amazon rainforest, a key challenge is ensuring reliable communication between end-devices and gateways (GWs). In this sense, this reliability is strongly affected by channel conditions. Thus, during the planning phase, choosing the appropriate channel model is an important decision for accurate simulations. Given this motivation, in this work, we propose an optimization model to evaluate the impact of different types of channels on coverage and packet delivery ratio in a forest scenario. We used channels from ray tracing, empirical, and stochastic approaches to assess how decisions made during the network planning phase, in terms of the channel used, affect GW placement and, specifically, the percentage of end-devices covered and the reliability of the communication system. Our results show that GW placement based on site-independent channels can overestimate the number of GWs required to meet the network requirements, whereas using site-specific channels allows us to satisfy the same requirements with fewer GWs.

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