Industrial grade wireless base station for Wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In this paper we present the design and development of an industrial grade wireless base station for industrial monitoring and control using wireless sensor networks. This paper highlights the need for a base station for wireless sensor networks, the challenges in deploying in industrial environments, the requirements of the base station in addressing those challenges and the design of an industrial grade wireless base station. Although a wireless sensor node is efficient enough to act as a base station in a wireless sensor network their processing power and communication capabilities are limited since they are designed to work at very low power. A large scale wireless sensor network usually consists of thousands of motes which have low-memory, low processing power, and limited communication capacity. To collaboratively monitor environment and obtain global information, centralized data processing by Base Station is necessary. A Base Station is a powerful device which has much higher processing power, more memory and much higher communication capabilities. The Industrial Wireless Base Station (iWase) built around the powerful AT91SAM9XE512 controller has higher processing power and supports Ethernet (wired) and GSM/GPRS (wireless) communication in addition to IEEE 802.15.4 radio communication with sensor nodes. iWase is provided with an ingress protection of IP65, which facilitates operation in harsh outdoor environments. iWase also provides excellent operation in the industrial environment with an operating temperature range of −40 to +85°C.