Air-dropped sensor network for real-time high-fidelity volcano monitoring

Abstract

This paper presents the design and deployment experience of an air-dropped wireless sensor network for volcano hazard monitoring. The deployment of five stations into the rugged crater of Mount St. Helens only took one hour with a helicopter. The stations communicate with each other through an amplified 802.15.4 radio and establish a self-forming and self-healing multi-hop wireless network. The distance between stations is up to 2 km. Each sensor station collects and delivers real-time continuous seismic, infrasonic, lightning, GPS raw data to a gateway. The main contribution of this paper is the design and evaluation of a robust sensor network to replace data loggers and provide real-time long-term volcano monitoring. The system supports UTCtime synchronized data acquisition with 1ms accuracy, and is online configurable. It has been tested in the lab environment, the outdoor campus and the volcano crater. Despite the heavy rain, snow, and ice as well as gusts exceeding 120 miles per hour, the sensor network has achieved a remarkable packet delivery ratio above 99% with an overall system uptime of about 93.8% over the 1.5 months evaluation period after deployment. Our initial deployment experiences with the system have alleviated the doubts of domain scientists and prove to them that a low-cost sensor network system can support real-time monitoring in extremely harsh environments.

Identified improvements of wireless sensor networks in smart grid: issues, requirements and challenges

“…Other work called STREE was proposed in Song et al (2009), which also aims to minimise latency and reduce energy costs. Assuming the overall synchronisation, the time slot is defined as the duration of successfully transmitting a maximum transmission unit.…”

Volcanic earthquake timing using wireless sensor networks

“…However, Lance adopts a heuristic metric to guide the sensor selection and does not apply signal compression before transmission. In the Optimized Autonomous Space In-situ Sensorweb (OASIS) project [27], twelve Imote2 nodes were deployed on Mount St. Helens in 2008. It demonstrated a long-term sustainable WSN in a challenging environment, and delivered a long-period (up to half a year), high-fidelity sensor dataset.…”

“…It demonstrated a long-term sustainable WSN in a challenging environment, and delivered a long-period (up to half a year), high-fidelity sensor dataset. The design of the above volcano monitoring WSNs [30,31,29,27] mainly focused on the basic network services such as node sustainability, network connectivity, time synchronization and data collection. As raw sensor data were continually collected, these systems either had short lifetimes [30,31] or had to employ heavy batteries [27].…”

“…Recent years have witnessed pilot deployments of inexpensive wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for active volcano monitoring [30,31,27]. These deployments demonstrated the potential of long-term, large-area, and fine-grained volcano coverage by deploying large numbers of low-cost sensors.…”

“…Significant research has been focused on improving system robustness, time synchronization, network efficiency, and communication performance issues. In previous smallscale deployments [30,31,27], detection and analysis of volcano activity were accomplished by transmitting raw data to a base station for centralized processing. However, as the sensor signals are sampled at high frequencies (e.g., 50 to 200 Hz), it is virtually impossible to continually collect raw, real-time data from a large-scale and dense WSN.…”