Wireless Sensor Networks for Environmental Monitoring

Abstract:

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have gained an increasing interest in a broad range of new scientific research and applications. WSN technologies can provide high resolution for spatial and temporal data which has not been possible before, opening up new opportunities. On the other hand, WSNs, particularly outdoor WSNs in harsh environments, present great challenges for scientists and engineers in terms of the network design, deployment, operation, management, and maintenance.

Since 2010, we have been working on the deployment of an outdoor multi-hop WSN testbed for hydrological/environmental monitoring in a forested hill-sloped region at the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania (ASWP), Pennsylvania, USA. The ASWP WSN testbed has continuously evolved and had more than 80 nodes by now. To our knowledge, the ASWP WSN testbed represents one of the first known long-term multi-hop WSN deployments in an outdoor environment. As simulation and laboratory methods are unable to capture the complexity of outdoor environments (e.g., forests, oceans, mountains, or glaciers), which significantly affect WSN operations and maintenance, experimental deployments are essential to investigate and understand WSN behaviors and performances as well as its maintenance characteristics under these harsh conditions.

In this talk, based on our empirical studies with the ASWP WSN testbed, we will present our discoveries and investigations on several important aspects including WSN energy profile, node reprogramming, network management system, and testbed maintenance. We will then provide our insight into these critical aspects of outdoor WSN deployments and operations.