Hardware platform for wide-area vehicular sensor networks with mobile nodes

In recent years, Wireless Sensor Networks have experienced significant growth, mainly motivated by the development of standard communication protocols and the availability of low cost microcontrollers and wireless transceivers, resulting in low-power small-size sensing and data processing capable devices, and wireless communication links. In this paper, a hardware platform for the deployment of a heterogeneous multi-tiered Sensor Network architecture supporting highly mobile nodes covering wide geographic areas for automotive applications is proposed. In the presented network architecture, the low level system consists of an IEEE 802.15.4 based Wireless Sensor Network fully composed of compatible devices that support all the standard functionalities. As a novelty, some extensions are proposed to release part of the topological restrictions of IEEE 802.15.4 communication protocol which limit the development of WSN for applications with wide area coverage and high mobility requirements. The proposed hardware platform has been implemented and experimentally validated and characterized in vehicular applications to monitor and communicate specific environmental parameters in a heavy transport fleet.