Platform of Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

In the past years, the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) were widely studied and apply in different areas, also different implements were developed for various applications. In addition, along the research and applications of the so call “Big Data”, WSNs are considered as one of the most effective means for data collections. In this project, various wireless technologies, e.g. WiFi, Bluetooth and ZigBee were preliminary studied. A prototype Wireless Sensor Network is designed and built based on the open standard ZigBee technology, open source hardware platform Arduino and free cloud platform Xively for WSNs data storage.

To demonstrate the operation of the proposed WSN, the proposed sensor nodes are designed to support various analog sensors, i.e. temperature, steam and ultrasonic sensors for distance measurement. The sensor nodes form a WSNs using the Xbee technology which complies the ZigBee standard. Moreover, to achieve the high network deployment flexibility, network coordinator of the proposed WSN equips a 3G mobile communication capability for mobile Internet access. Therefore sensor data can be consolidated and uploaded to the cloud platform for WSNs data storage anywhere, anytime with the mobile network coverage.

Numbers of prototype sensor nodes are built and evaluated. The sensors report measured qualities with acceptable tolerance. E.g. ultra-sonic sensor reports < 0.52% average error for the distance test within 0.20 m to 4.00 m. All prototype sensor nodes in this project are power up by a single standard 3.70V batter and least for operation of ~300 days. The collected data are collected through the cloud based WSNs platform. A mobile GUI is designed and developed on open Android platform, which allows remote access and visualize the WSN data with certain analysis capabilities.

Finally, except the collect sensor data, the remote sensor nodes can report the power status of the battery so as to ease the maintenance and operations of the proposed WSNs smoothly. The proposed WSN provides a basic platform of the ZigBee WSN and demonstrate its high flexibility by integrating various open technologies, ZigBee, Arduino, Android and Cloud WSN data storage.