Wireless infrastructure for remote environmental monitoring: Deployment and evaluation

Abstract

The world is witnessing tremendous innovation in wireless sensing technology, which creates opportunities to benefit environmental monitoring in significant ways. However, there are several challenges that are not thoroughly discussed by current studies in designing the wireless network infrastructure for these applications. In general, the monitoring units should provide reliable data communication across diverse environments. The wireless system should also meet requirements that most current platforms fail to satisfy, such as scalable coverage, reliability, robustness, and low operating cost. Finally, the network architecture should be kept simple to aid in the management of infrastructure deployments across disparate environments. With the aim of addressing these challenges, a two-tier network architecture for remote environmental monitoring is described in this study: (i) A sensor gateway is designed to transmit observation data from local sensors at the first tier. (ii) The second tier of the infrastructure reliably replays this data to a remote server for analysis via a wireless mesh network. A wide range of environments are supported, from open fields and dense forests, to Wi-Fi areas and cellular-only zones. In this study, a wireless backhaul network comprising wireless sensor gateways was deployed in Aiken, South Carolina. The network performance was systematically evaluated through experimental trials. Results demonstrate the infrastructures ability to support effective data collection and reliable data transmission.