Design, Implementation, and Experiments on Outdoor Deployment of Wireless Sensor Network for Environmental Monitoring

This paper presents the design, implementation, and practical real world experiments of an energy optimized multi-hop wireless sensor network (WSN) targeted at environmental monitoring. The WSN is fully autonomous and consists of energy-efficient and scalable communication protocols and low-power hardware platform. Software tools are developed for configuring and analyzing large scale networks. The network has been deployed in outdoor environment consisting of 20 nodes covering over 2 km2 area. The results show that the multi-hop network works autonomously, reacts to environmental changes, and is able to operate temperatures down to -30 °C. The hardware nodes operating on 433 MHz frequency provide over 1 km communication distances, while still having sufficient throughput and low energy consumption. The deployed nodes had a lifetime of 6 months with a 1600 mAh battery, while generating 4 packets per minute.