The Effectiveness of a Wireless Sensor Network System for Landslide Monitoring

In this paper, the application of a WSN (Wireless Sensor Network) for landslide monitoring was studied. The WSN system consists of a sensor node for collecting and transmitting data using the IEEE 802.14e standard and a gateway for processing and transmitting the data to the final server. The topology of the sensor network adopts a highly flexible and reliable mesh type, and a test bed was built in three locations in Seoul. An instrumentation is done for each sensor node composing of two soil moisture sensors, one tensiometer, and one inclinometer and one rain gauge per test bed. For the estimation of optimal network topology among the sensor nodes, a susceptibility assessment of landslides, the density of trees and a viewshed analysis of the terrain were analyzed. As a result, the network connection worked quite well, and the response of the soil from rainfall was similar to the soil water characteristic curve obtained from laboratory tests. Therefore, a WSN system can be applied to landslide monitoring by collecting reliable data. In addition, the appropriate design method of WSN system for landslide monitoring was proposed.