An Investigation of a Power Efficient Wireless Sensor Network Model for Interior Environmental Monitoring

Speaker: Shah Muhammud Fadil Auckburaully [@WSNEngineer], CMS, University of Greenwich

Date: Wednesday 23rd February 2011

Venue: Greenwich Maritime Campus - King William 315

Time: 14:00-16:00

Audience: students, researchers, technicians and academics/industry in areas of power, wireless communication, control and instrumentation, electronics, computing with an interest in wireless sensor networks, IEEE 802.15.4 standard, structure health monitoring and algorithmic compression.

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Mankind has enabled his physical landscape to communicate with him using sensors. Sensory data can be retrieved from various environments – both interior and exterior ones. This talk focuses on the power consumption of wireless sensor nodes when they transmit sensory data from sensor to sink nodes for the purpose of interior environmental monitoring.

Many tests are conducted to verify and analyse the power efficiency of the nodes. Power has always been an issue with Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Wireless sensor nodes usually operate on minimal power. The findings of two scenarios are presented. The first scenario is luminance monitoring. Wireless sensor nodes sensing luminance are placed next to a window. The second one is interior environmental monitoring. Several wireless sensor nodes are deployed in a room. They monitor temperature, humidity and luminance. The nodes transmit sensory data to a sink node at different intervals in time.

Two algorithms are developed to improve overall network lifetime. The first one is a basic sensing and transmission algorithm and it is meant to serve as development base for the proposed algorithm. The latter is meant to increase the lifetime of the wireless sensor nodes and thereby the Wireless Sensor Network but also reduce the amount of power used by the nodes per duty cycle.This talk describes WSNs and their applications, the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, architecture of wireless sensor nodes, and highlights the development challenges related to developing power efficient algorithms for wireless sensor nodes.

Shah has a Bachelor's degree in Business Information Technology and a Master's degree in Mobile Computing and Communications. Shah's primary interests are Wireless Sensor Networks, Embedded Systems, Smart Antenna Technology (esp. MIMO), Smart Grid, Parallel & Cluster Algorithmic computing. He is a member of the ACM and the IEEE. He is also a professional member of the British Computer Society. For more information about him, Google him or check his website out.

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