GreenOrbs: Lessons Learned from Extremely Large Scale Sensor Network Deployment

Abstract

“The world has just ten years to bring greenhouse gas emissions under control before the damage they cause becomes irreversible.” This is a famous prediction raised by climate scientists and environmentalists recently. It reflects the increasing attention in the past decade from human beings on global climate change and environmental pollution. On the other hand, forest, which is regarded as the earths lung, is a critical component in global carbon cycle. It is able to absorb 10% - 30% of CO2 from industrial emissions. Moreover, it has large capacity of water conservation, preventing water and soil loss, and hence reducing the chance of nature disasters like mud-rock flows and floods. Forestry applications usually require long-term, large-scale, continuous, and synchronized surveillance of huge measurement areas with diverse creatures and complex terrains. The state-of-arts forestry techniques, however, support only small-scale, discontinuous, asynchronous, and coarse-grained measurements, which at the same time incur large amount of cost with respect to human resource and equipments. WSNs have great potential in resolving the challenges in forestry. Under such circumstances, GreenOrbs is launched. The information GreenOrbs offers can be used as evidences, references, and scientific tools for human beings in the battle against global climate changes and environmental pollution.