title: Large Scale Environmental Monitoring through Integration of Sensor and Mesh Networks.
abstract: Monitoring outdoor environments through networks of wireless sensors has received interest for collecting physical and chemical samples at high spatial and temporal scales. A central challenge to environmental monitoring applications of sensor networks is the short communication range of the sensor nodes, which increases the complexity and cost of monitoring commodities that are located in geographically spread areas. To address this issue, we propose a new communication architecture that integrates sensor networks with medium range wireless mesh networks, and provides users with an advanced web portal for managing sensed information in an integrated manner. Our architecture adopts a holistic approach targeted at improving the user experience by optimizing the system performance for handling data that originates at the sensors, traverses the mesh network, and resides at the server for user consumption. This holistic approach enables users to set high level policies that can adapt the resolution of information collected at the sensors, set the preferred performance targets for their application, and run a wide range of queries and analysis on both real-time and historical data. All system components and processes will be described in this paper.
authors.affiliation: CSIRO ICT Centre, QCAT Technology Court, Pullenvale, QLD 4069, Australia. rjurdak@ieee.org.
authors.forename: Raja
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Jurdak
authors.affiliation: Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland. nafaa@ieee.org.
authors.forename: Abdelhamid
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Nafaa
authors.affiliation: Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland. alessiobarbirato@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Alessio
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Barbirato
keywords: autonomous; mesh; network management; scalable; sensors; wireless