Evolution and sustainability of a wildlife monitoring sensor network

Abstract

As sensor network technologies become more mature, they are increasingly being applied to a wide variety of applications, ranging from agricultural sensing to cattle, oceanic and volcanic monitoring. Significant efforts have been made in deploying and testing sensor networks resulting in unprecedented sensing capabilities. A key challenge has become how to make these emerging wireless sensor networks more sustainable and easier to maintain over increasingly prolonged deployments.In this paper, we report the findings from a one year deployment of an automated wildlife monitoring system for analyzing the social co-location patterns of European badgers (Meles meles) residing in a dense woodland environment.We describe the stages of its evolution cycle, from implementation, deployment and testing, to various iterations of software optimization, followed by hardware enhancements, which in turn triggered the need for further software optimization. We report preliminary descriptive analyses of a subset of the data collected, demonstrating the significant potential our system has to generate new insights into badger behavior. The main lessons learned were: the need to factor in the maintenance costs while designing the system; to look carefully at software and hardware interactions; the importance of a rapid initial prototype deployment (this was key to our success); and the need for continuous interaction with domain scientists which allows for unexpected optimizations.

Data pre-forwarding for opportunistic data collection in wireless sensor networks

“…However, a scientist will collect all data from a sensor node once it is visited. Hence, the mobility is not totally uncontrolled, and the problem studied in Dyo et al [2010] is different from that of our article.…”

“…In Dyo et al [2010], spatial locality of the scientists' mobility has been leveraged. The domain experts assign priorities to sensor data, and sensor nodes are classified based on the frequency of being visited.…”

Trajectory Approximation for Resource Constrained Mobile Sensor Networks

“…These small sensor nodes are particularly well-suited for tracking the individual movement patterns of wildlife [1]- [3]. The trajectory data stored in the node memory is offloaded to a base station (BS) when the tracked animal arrives back at a known location (e.g, watering hole).…”

Lattitude, Longitude, and Beyond : Mining Mobile Object's Behavior

“…The reader (including an antenna) reads and/or writes data to tags through electromagnetic transmissions. RFID tags have been used to study various entities (birds [113], reptiles [114,115], amphibians [116], mammals [117,118] , and humans [115]). …”

“…This kind of RFID reader can be used with various types of passive ear tags. In [117] a hybrid detection node is designed by integrating RFID readers with Tmote Sky motes for collecting spatio-temporal data from badgers. Authors of [118] have interfaced the tag readers with Fleck wireless sensor network nodes to track the movement of farm animals near the readers.…”