A Relocable and Resilient Distributed Measurement System for Electromagnetic Exposure Assessment

Abstract

The problem of measuring the electromagnetic (EM) exposure through a distributed, real-time, and inexpensive approach is addressed in this paper. A relocable and resilient system is proposed which combines: the flexibility given by a wireless sensor network (WSN) backbone, enabling an high scalability and reconfigurability of the monitoring architecture; the fidelity and robustness of an ad hoc designed three-axis field probe (mounted on each node in the WSN), which guarantees satisfactory measurement accuracy despite its compact, low consumption, and inexpensive nature (unlike traditional technologies for EM exposure assessment); and also because of the self-tuning capabilities of the resulting architecture (which exploits the environmental parameters monitored by each node to consider the intrinsic thermal drifts in the field probe response). The proposed system is designed and experimentally validated in selected real-time scenarios, also in comparison with professional field probe solutions. The capability of the introduced architecture to implement cooperative communication strategies and to enable a reliable and fault-tolerant data transmission has been demonstrated, as well.