MasliNET: A Wireless Sensor Network based environmental monitoring system

Wireless Sensor Networks have gained a tremendous attention in the last decade. They provide unobtrusive monitoring of the ambient, with low power consumption and robustness as key challenges. In this paper we present MasliNET, a multimodal environmental monitoring system built for microclimate and pest monitoring in olive groves. The system consists of a low-power wireless sensor network, a GPRS Internet access layer and a central server. Our wireless sensor node FER Cvorak is based on a SoC module featuring an 8-bit microcontroller and a 2.4 GHz ZigBee compliant transceiver. It supports several sensors — temperature, air humidity, soil moisture, illumination, air pressure and a camera with a low-power FPGA. The network coordinator is connected to the GPRS gateway which connects the ZigBee sensor network to the Internet. A multilayer serial protocol was designed to reliably interconnect these two devices. The GPRS module runs an embedded web server through which network parameters can be directly configured. In order to ensure sufficient energy for autonomous operation of the nodes, we implemented an energy harvesting unit consisting of a solar panel, maximum power point tracking hardware and rechargeable batteries. In this paper we give an overview of the system development and architecture.