Historical Building Monitoring Using an Energy-Efficient Scalable Wireless Sensor Network Architecture

Abstract

We present a set of novel low power wireless sensor nodes designed for monitoring wooden masterpieces and historical buildings, in order to perform an early detection of pests. Although our previous star-based system configuration has been in operation for more than 13 years, it does not scale well for sensorization of large buildings or when deploying hundreds of nodes. In this paper we demonstrate the feasibility of a cluster-based dynamic-tree hierarchical Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) architecture where realistic assumptions of radio frequency data transmission are applied to cluster construction, and a mix of heterogeneous nodes are used to minimize economic cost of the whole system and maximize power saving of the leaf nodes. Simulation results show that the specialization of a fraction of the nodes by providing better antennas and some energy harvesting techniques can dramatically extend the life of the entire WSN and reduce the cost of the whole system. A demonstration of the proposed architecture with a new routing protocol and applied to termite pest detection has been implemented on a set of new nodes and should last for about 10 years, but it provides better scalability, reliability and deployment properties.

Extending the Battery Life of the ZigBee Routers and Coordinator by Modifying Their Mode of Operation

“…We compared different works that did not propose directly the enlarging of EDs battery life. Those methods are [20,22,24,27,30]. We rule out doing a complete simulation of the other methods because we did not have the essential details to be able to do it.…”

“…That also complicated an accurate comparison because we focused on the enlarging of RDs battery life but those works were focused on WSN nodes. The tree-topology was used by [22,24] and us (one-level tree). The rest of the methods used star topology ( [24] also used a cluster topology).…”

“…An interesting survey of different strategies for energy-saving in ZigBee WSNs in the context of IoT is shown in [14]. In general, the analyzed proposals are in three main lines: (a) management of channel and timing (physical level) [15][16][17]; (b) modification of the Medium Access Control (MAC) standard (MAC level) [18,19]; and (c) control of different parameters to reduce consumption [20][21][22][23][24][25].…”

“…Like the last works, our approach uses a timer to activate the EDs for transmitting data messages to the RD at which they are associated. The authors in [24] presented a set of novel low-power wireless sensor nodes designed for monitoring wooden masterpieces and historical buildings in order to perform an early detection of pests. They proposed a new architecture with a new routing protocol.…”

Ultra-Low Power Optical Sensor for Xylophagous Insect Detection in Wood

“…We designed the sensing principles and implemented it for the enterprise AIDIMA (Furniture, Wood and Packaging Technology Institute) and has been successfully applied in monitoring different types of wood structures [24,26]. …”