Design of a Multi-Hop Wireless Network to Continuous Indoor Air Quality Monitoring

摘要

In indoor environments (homes, industrial buildings, etc), fires or exposure to toxic or flammable gases are non-rare incidents. Timely detection of incident-indicative air parameters is of crucial importance to incident prevention or to the minimization of the consequences to human health. The existing solutions lack in coverage and continuous real-time data accessibility. This paper presents the design and implementation of the system for near real-time continuous air quality monitoring based on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). It is primarily dedicated for the indoor environments although, with some modifications, it can be used outdoors as well. The proposed system focuses on remote monitoring of the typical incident-indicative parameters such as: temperature, humidity, CO, Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), and smoke. In order to increase the sensing coverage and connectivity, and to decrease the energy consumption of the smart sensors, the proposed system utilizes ZigBee based multi-hop communication paradigm along with specific sleep/active sensing and communication duty cycle. The results show that, besides being flexible and low cost, the proposed system shows satisfying performance in terms of overall functionality and reliability. Power consumption of the nodes can also be considered as satisfying, although, in this direction, additional measures could be taken for further improvements.