Wireless sensor networks in environmental monitoring: existing applications and basic guidelines.

Abstract

The particular thesis investigates the real applications of Wireless Sensor Networks that have been implemented to date. The last decades the WSN technology has been adopted by more and more scientific fields for accurate and effective monitoring of climate phenomena like air pollution, destruction phenomena like landslides, etc. It has been widely used in agriculture as well as in horticulture for field monitoring. WSN is an emerging technology, which through the research in the labs and the real deployments has been proved to be a significant and valuable tool for scientists to explore another world which is behind the various environmental phenomena using tiny sensor nodes. There is a reference on the basic components of a sensor node. In addition, the commonly used sensor node platforms are mentioned and the operating systems which are the most used and are supported by most of these platforms. Of course there are other platforms and OSs as well. According to existing applications, tables were developed for categorization of these projects in order to obtain and present a general view of the technology used in wireless sensor networks. These tables provide useful information about the conditions under which the deployments were conducted, about the hardware and the software is being used, etc. Based on this data, a basic guide is proposed for someone who is interested in deploying a WSN system. This guide has been developed for different types of deployments, which in this thesis is related to environmental ones such as monitoring wild animals and livestock, air-water pollution monitoring, vineyard monitoring and others.