Issues in Environmental Pollution Monitoring Using Distributed Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a structure consisting of compilation of nodes and a base station. A node is self-possessed by a processor, limited memory, sensors, radio and battery. A base station is responsible for receiving and processing data collected by the wireless sensor nodes. They carry out collaborative activities due to limited resources, such as battery, processor and scarce memory. Nowadays, the applications of WSNs are several and diverse, and the applications in agriculture are still budding. One appealing WSN application is in environmental monitoring and greenhouses, where the plant conditions such as climate and soil does not depend on natural agents. To manage and monitor the environmental factors, sensors and actuators are critical. Under these circumstances, WSN should be used to make a distributed assessment, spreading sensors all over the greenhouse by means of distributed clustering. This paper reveals some grave issues when a wireless sensor network is exposed to real world environment to monitor and manage parameters like temperature, humidity, smoke, CO2 , light and green house gases and how distributed clustering mechanisms can be integrated within this monitoring process.