A novel wireless mobile platform integrated with optical fibre sensors

Abstract

This paper presents a novel design of wireless mobile platform which enables effective integration of a number of optical fibre sensors with an advanced mobile wireless sensor network (WSN) and allows for potential applications such as monitoring in remote and harsh environments and tracking, exploiting fully the advantages offered both by mobile WSN and by advanced optical fibre sensing technologies. The platform which was designed and implemented consists of an optical fibre sensor module and a smart mobile WSN module, which shows important advantages for mobile sensing and tracking and mesh networking. In this study, a fibre Bragg grating (FBG)-based temperature sensor was specially designed and integrated successfully into the optical fibre sensor module as an exemplar to investigate the performance of the integrated system based on the mobile WSN platform. The positive experimental results obtained have confirmed the functionality of the platform designed and demonstrated its capacity for real-time optical fibre sensor data monitoring, processing and wireless transmission. The successful creation of this type of wireless mobile platform with optical fibre sensors would be expected to make an important impact on many sectors, where either conventional optical sensor designs or WSNs alone cannot meet the systems requirements.