Wireless Sensor Networks for Environmental Monitoring Applications

Abstract

After many years of rigorous research and development in wireless sensor network (WSN) technology with numerous responses to innovative applications, WSNs still have some interesting unanswered questions. In this thesis we explain the challenges of the state of art in WSN for environmental monitoring applications using open-source hardware platforms, Arduino UNO, DHT11 temperature-humidity sensor, XBee and Raspberry Pi. The system is not only low cost but scalable enough to accept multiple sensor nodes associated with environmental monitoring. Leveraging on WSN & cloud technologies, we present the design and implement a cloud-based online real-time environmental data (temperature-humidity) collection platform to avoid memory conflicts of the BS that already has small storage capacity. We implement a robust sensor node failure detector to enable user know the status of the network at every point in time under an online real-time basis. In this thesis we have detailed the overall construction architecture of the hardware and software design. Some samples of the deployment and measurement data obtained are presented using various charts to validate the practicality of the system. We emphasize the importance of having a generic system in which its ZigBee network configuration function set (router and coordinator) mode of data transmission will be implemented in API mode to accommodate any sensor node for better packet reception (RX) and transmission (TX).