Environmental Monitoring with Distributed Mesh Networks: An Overview and Practical Implementation Perspective for Urban Scenario

Abstract

Almost inevitable climate change and increasing pollution levels around the world are the most significant drivers for the evolution of environmental monitoring solutions. Recent activities in wireless sensor networks have made tremendous progress concerning conventional centralized sensor networks known for decades. However, most systems developed today still face challenges while estimating the trade-off between their flexibility and security. In this work, we first provide an overview of selected environmental monitoring strategies and applications. We conclude that modern wireless sensor networks of tomorrow would mostly have a distributed nature and, thus, we present the results of the prototyping of such a secure distributed system from both the hardware and software perspectives. The developed mechanisms provide the ability to connect in infrastructure and mesh modes, where each sensor can act as a relay, which allows to increase the system failure resistance and improve its scalability. Moreover, we develop an authentication mechanism to ensure the transparent migration of any node between different network segments while maintaining the security of the entire operation on a high level. Finally, we report on the real-life deployment results.Almost inevitable climate change and increasing pollution levels around the world are the most significant drivers for the evolution of environmental monitoring solutions. Recent activities in wireless sensor networks have made tremendous progress concerning conventional centralized sensor networks known for decades. However, most systems developed today still face challenges while estimating the trade-off between their flexibility and security. In this work, we first provide an overview of selected environmental monitoring strategies and applications. We conclude that modern wireless sensor networks of tomorrow would mostly have a distributed nature and, thus, we present the results of the prototyping of such a secure distributed system from both the hardware and software perspectives. The developed mechanisms provide the ability to connect in infrastructure and mesh modes, where each sensor can act as a relay, which allows to increase the system failure resistance and improve its scalability. Moreover, we develop an authentication mechanism to ensure the transparent migration of any node between different network segments while maintaining the security of the entire operation on a high level. Finally, we report on the real-life deployment results.