Satellite Monitoring of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs)

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are one of the most important technologies of this century. There are several challenges since WSNs are usually deployed in remote and hazardous areas. One of them is how to transmit the data from all the sensor nodes efficiently to a server/database for back office application to process the information. This paper is based on a project the purpose of which was to find a way to transmit the sensor data from WSN effectively in real time to a back office application. I proposed and implemented a global, low power satellite monitoring solution for remote monitoring of WSNs. The project implements an end-to-end solution from the WSN installed in the field to a user via an internet enabled device. The project was divided into 3 semi-independent tasks: Interface with WSN and programming of the satellite terminal; XML gateway interface to receive/send/decode messages from the service provider (Honeywell's message handling system) and to store the data in the database; and an interactive web application. The web application provide Fleet report (arranged by region) and message history report for each asset/unit. It also support interactive Google maps (via JavaScript based API), Google Earth (KML files) interface, for enhanced 3-D visualization of information, charts/graphs of sensor data and Excel sheet download for detailed analysis of data. The web application utilizes DHTML, PHP, JavaScript, jQuery and CSS for dynamic content of the web interface.