P. L. Divya

Wireless sensor network for river water quality monitoring in India

Water is an important natural resource which needs constant quality monitoring for ensuring its safe use. This paper introduces a river water quality monitoring system based on wireless sensor network which helps in continuous and remote monitoring of the water quality data in India. The wireless sensor node in the system is designed for monitoring the pH of water, which is one of the main parameters that affect the quality of water. The proposed sensor node design mainly comprises of a signal conditioning module, processing module, wireless communication module and the power module. The sensed pH value will be wirelessly transmitted to the base station using Zigbee communication after the required signal conditioning and processing techniques. The circuit for the sensor node is designed, simulated and the hardware prototype is developed using the appropriate components which minimize the power requirement of the system and provides a cost effective platform for monitoring water quality.

A swarm intelligence based distributed localization technique for wireless sensor network

Wireless sensor network (WSN) refers to a group of spatially dispersed and dedicated sensors for monitoring and recording the physical conditions of the environment and organizing the collected data at a central location. Sensor Localization is a fundamental challenge in WSN. In this paper localization is modeled as a multi dimensional optimization problem. A comparison study of energy of processing and transmission in a wireless node is done, main inference made is that transmission process consumes more than processing. An energy efficient distributed localization technique is proposed. Distributive localization is addressed using swarm techniques Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Comprehensive Learning Particle Swarm Optimization (CLPSO) because of their quick convergence to quality solutions. The performances of both algorithms are studied. The accuracy of both algorithms is analyzed using parameters such as number of nodes localized, computational time and localization error. A simulation was conducted for 100 target nodes and 20 beacon nodes, the results show that the PSO based localization is faster and CLPSO is more accurate.

A remote triggered wireless sensor network testbed

This paper presents a remote triggered wireless sensor network (WSN) testbed used to facilitate multi-user remote access to the WSN experiments for virtual learning of wireless sensor network concepts. This testbed provides multiset, multi-group of WSN experimental setup that is capable to provide opportunity to perform remote code editing using over the air programming mechanism. This testbed also provides an intuitive web-based interface to the registered users for running the experiments, accessing and editing the source code of the experiment from anywhere in the world by means of internet. This remote triggering mechanism offers the user a flexible environment for the experimentation. An experimentation setup of 150 wireless sensor nodes are developed to suit the design of both indoor and outdoor experiments. The outdoor lab setup allows the users to learn the wireless propagational effects in the real environment. The WSN indoor lab setup comprises of nine sensor network experiments which allows the users to learn the WSN concepts such as configuring a WSN, clustering mechanisms, time synchronization mechanisms and experience the practical implementation in real time. This test bed offers the researchers and students an opportunity to trigger their inquisitiveness by providing the access to remote equipments and materials needed for the experimentation, shared via virtual manner wherein the experiment conduction and output observation can be performed online through an effective visualization tool.

CAWIS: Context aware wireless irrigation system

Water scarcity is one of the major problems faced by the whole world. In India, this situation is aggravated since agriculture is one of the major economies. As per the statistics of 2009, India has 35.12% of total land under irrigation. The objective of this work is to reduce the water usage in irrigation processes. In this regard, we have proposed a context aware wireless sensor network system for irrigation management. This multi-sensor system will continuously monitor the relevant environmental parameters, hydrological parameters, soil parameters and crop specific parameters to derive the context. These derived contexts will be used for automatic control and adaptation of the irrigation system. This context aware system uses the real-time sensor data to minimize the wastage of water used in the irrigation process. This research has also proposed an innovative design for horizontal angle adjustment of sprinkler nozzle using stepper motor. This remotely controllable sprinkler system can be wirelessly controlled, based on the decisions derived from the multi-sensors deployed in the agriculture field. The system also includes GSM module, which updates the user about the watering decisions being taken and executed on the fields. This paper describes the experimentation results of this system and it clearly shows that the system can effectively reduce water usage compared to the conventional systems.

Topology Preserving Map Generation for Multiple Mobile Fishing Vessels

In Indian coastal zone, real-time tracking of fishing vessels is nonexisting. This leads to numerous challenges in search and rescue operation, communicating emergency messages, etc. A quick solution for this is to install GPS devices, which is costly. In our research work, we designed and developed a low-cost hybrid solution with minimum number of location aware nodes. Real-time relative location information of mobile sensor nodes was developed by integrating mobility management, virtual coordinate system (VCS), and topology preserving map (TPM). The architecture is implemented in MATLAB and is tested with a rectangular network scenario with up to five mobile nodes and is able to track the relative location trace of mobile nodes at a particular interval of time. The effect of various simulation parameters such as communication range, node placement, number of mobile nodes, and sampling rate selection in tracking the mobile nodes with our system is also performed.

Augmenting packet delivery rate in outdoor wireless sensor networks through frequency optimization

The deployment of a wireless sensor network for real-time monitoring applications encounters numerous challenges. In a typical outdoor scenario the propagation of the radio signal can be affected by several factors like the rainfall, foliage, path loss effect and fading effect. These factors can confront dynamic changes in link quality which will affect the packet delivery rates and can result in the failure of the system. This paper presents an optimized frequency selection for any wireless sensor networks which can enhance the packet delivery ratio at any worst environmental scenarios through a simulated framework in QualNet 5.0.2.

A Remote Code Editing Framework for AMRITA Remote Triggered WSN Laboratory

Our AMRITA remote triggered lab (RT Lab) for wireless sensor networks (WSN) offer the students and researchers, an easy, efficient, interactive and user friendly environment to trigger their inquisitiveness by providing them with the sensors, equipments, hardwares and study materials for conducting the lab experiments. RT Lab offers a web-based e-learning platform for the registered users to perform experimentation and coding remotely based on the provided study materials which are shared to them virtually. The users can learn nesC programming language and conduct the coding by means of the code editing interface. The sensor nodes in the WSN testbed, deployed in indoor and outdoor environment, undergoes remote reconfiguration and the sensor datas are collected by the WSN gateway. The users can observe the experimentation result such as the plotted sensor data and physical representation of the sensor network along with the remote video through the visualization tool. The paper details the design and implementation of remote code editing platform for RT Lab.

E-Cycle: An offgrid solution for rural electrification

Statistics show that more than 18,452 villages in India are still unelectrified with more than 890,000 rural households having no access to lighting at all. Since the current electrification schemes are not affordable for rural households, the major challenge was to develop an affordable solution that can be easily used by the villagers. Bicycles are extensively used by villagers. The annual demand for bicycles in India is 2.5 million bicycles per year. In this paper, we propose an innovative methodology to generate and store energy produced during the cycling process and use it later for lighting rural households. We also have integrated a solar panel into our system to allow energy to be generated while the bicycle is not in use but is outdoors during the daytime. This paper describes the design and development of an Energy Cycle (E-Cycle). The complete system was tested extensively to understand the amount of energy generated with respect to the bicycling speed, duration of cycling, etc., as well as the rate of energy produced from the solar panel during cycling and non-cycling periods during varying weather and seasonal conditions. Results show that one bicycle is capable of generating energy for lighting a rural house for 18–20 hours per day.

Over the Air Programming Method for Learning Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are small or tiny devices that consists of different sensors to sense physical parameters like air pressure, temperature, vibrations, movement etc., process these data and sends it to the central data center to take decisions. The WSN domain, has wide range of applications such as monitoring and detecting natural hazards like landslides, forest fire, avalanche, flood monitoring and also in healthcare applications. With such different applications, it is being taught in undergraduate/post graduate level in many universities under department of computer science. But the cost and infrastructure required to setup the WSN Lab for having the students getting hands on expertise on these devices is expensive. This paper gives overview about the Remote triggered lab that consists of more than 80 WSN nodes connected with various sensors, digital multimeters etc., that helps the students to remotely login from anywhere in the world using the World Wide Web, configure the nodes and learn the WSN concepts in intuitive way. The paper also proposes the application of over the air programming method to the remote triggered lab and the implemented protocol handshakes between processor and flash chip to store multiple images in micaz hardware. This helps to remotely program the nodes simultaneously and view the results with real time video streaming, without the nodes being physical connected to the computer system and thereby allowing for sparse deployment.

Improved topology preserving maps for wireless sensor networks through D-VCS

Network management is crucial to implement large wireless sensor network. The network may contain hundreds to thousands of node. Furthermore, it is imperative to know the connectivity and location of the nodes to envision the framework of the network. Compared to GPS and other localization techniques, the virtual coordinate (VC) system is an affordable and efficient solution. In previous studies, the hop count from all anchor nodes was used to define the VC of a node, but the studies do not address the chance of having the same virtual coordinates. This paper introduces a distance-based virtual coordinate system (D-VCS) that uses physical distance along the shortest path from all anchor nodes to obtain distinctive virtual coordinates (VC). In the current study, we tested and analyzed the proposed D-VCS and compared it with the hop-based VCS mentioned in a previous study. We introduced a metric for connectivity error which quantitatively analyzed the precision of the introduced system. After completing the study, we observed that the TPM obtained from D-VCS shows lesser error compared to hop-based VCS. Furthermore, there was a mean deviation in connectivity error of approximately 23 % between both systems.