Abstract
The acquisition of data in protected natural environments is subordinated to actions that do not stress the life-forms present in that environment. This is why researchers face two conflicting interests: autonomous and robust systems that minimize the physical interaction with sensors once installed, and complex enough ones to capture and process higher volumes of data. On the basis of this situation, this paper analyses the current state-of-the-art of wireless multimedia sensor networks, identifying the limitations and needs of these solutions. In this sense, in order to improve the trade-off between autonomous and computational capabilities, this paper proposes a heterogeneous multiprocessor sensor platform, consisting of an ultra-low power microcontroller and a high-performance processor, which transfers control between processors as needed. This architecture allows the shutdown of idle systems and fail-safe remote reprogramming. The sensor equipment can be adapted to the needs of the project. The deployed equipment incorporates, in addition to environmental meteorological variables, a microphone input and two cameras (visible and thermal) to capture multimedia data. In addition to the hardware description, the paper provides a brief description of how long-range (LoRa) can be used for sending large messages (such as an image or a new firmware), an economic analysis of the platform, and a study on energy consumption of the platform according to different use cases.
Highlights
The study of environmental parameters and how these are changing related to human presence are a growing interest nowadays [1]
Taking into account that wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) have to deal with more complex sensors than typical Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), computational resources become a necessity in these kinds of sensor networks
Few available WMSN platforms use systems with a single, medium performance processor [18,19,21]. These medium performance architectures have very limited resources in terms of memory sizes and computational resources, which makes the development of complex multimedia processing applications difficult
Summary
The study of environmental parameters and how these are changing related to human presence are a growing interest nowadays [1]. WMSN platforms [16,17,18,19,20,21,22] only have image or/and audio sensors and do not include climate or meteorological sensors, which are very important input parameters in environmental monitoring studies These environmental monitoring devices are usually ad hoc hardware solutions designed for specific applications [23]. WMSN nodes have a complex internal firmware typically developed for specific applications and are hardly upgradable once they have been deployed, requiring going to the location, which could be arduous and complex Taking all this into account, this paper is focused on the design of a new flexible, scalable, upgradable, and reliable architecture for WMSN node to obtain and study environmental parameters, in an unattended manner, and with very low power consumption and high computational capabilities. As will be seen along this analysis, all these constraints are related to each other, meaning that a tradeoff between them must be found
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