Designing an open source maintenance-free Environmental Monitoring Application for Wireless Sensor Networks

We discuss the entire process for the analysis and design of an Environmental Monitoring Application for Wireless Sensor Networks, using existing open source components to create the application. We provide a thorough study of the different alternatives, from the selection of the embedded operating system to the different algorithms and strategies. The application has been designed to gather temperature and relative humidity data following the rules of quality assurance for environmental measurements, suitable for use in both research and industry. The main features of the application are: (a) runs in a multihop low-cost network based on IEEE 802.15.4, (b) improved network reliability and lifetimes, (c) easy management and maintenance-free, (d) ported to different platforms and (e) allows different configurations and network topologies. The application has been tested and validated in several long-term outdoor deployments with very good results and the conclusions are aligned with the experimental evidence.