Performance Analysis of Location Based Smart Catastrophe Monitoring System Using WSN

Sudden accident in factories causes huge damage to human life and property which is a serious problem. The fire incident of Baldia Town factory Karachi, Pakistan on September 11, 2012, took precious lives of approximately 259 workers. In order to overcome such catastrophe, a reliable system based on Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is proposed. The WSNs are considered as emerging, reliable and advantageous technologies due to their self-configuring and self-organizing capabilities. Sensors are integrated to collect the required data. The system not only monitors catastrophe inside the factory but also generate alerts at the same instant to the nearby places (i.e. Residential Areas, Schools etc.). The sole purpose is to inform the workers (working inside the factory) and people (residing within factory premises) about the worst situation and hence save their lives. The proposed work revolves around two scenarios of system deployment. First is using fixed monitoring nodes and other is using mobile monitoring nodes. The prototype is firstly tested within the normal environment, secondly, with high intensity of the fire, and thirdly when the intensity of fire is kept low. It is evident from the graphs that the readings are continuously being updated not only on the display (receiver node) placed at the emergency center within the factory but on the web page as well and it then generates various emergency notifications via android application, web page and SMS. Graphs taken under different environments also show that the alarms are generated as soon as the readings cross threshold levels indicates catastrophe. To the best of our knowledge, no such system is available in the market which is generating alerts using multiple ways, hence makes the proposed system more authenticated. For mobile node scenario, this work deals with the fundamental challenge of wireless sensor networks i.e. node localization which describes that the readings obtained from a node must define the position where it is deployed. Therefore, localization technique is also introduced for catastrophe monitoring system. Location of nodes can make rapid responses to encounter the catastrophe before it reaches the intensity. RSSI Based Trilateration and Centroid Algorithm is introduced to find the location of nodes.