WSNs in environmental monitoring: Data acquisition and dissemination aspects

Abstract

The growth in world population, industrialization, and urbanization, are inducing harmful effects on living environment. Current air and water pollution trends indicate the emergent need for actions toward systematic and continuous identification and management of the pollution sources. Conventional environmental monitoring systems are based on manual periodic on-site sampling, typically by using expensive sparsely deployed instruments. As such, these systems cannot appropriately follow the pollutants' spatiotemporal distribution. On the other hand, the advances in low-cost sensors, embedded systems and low-power wireless technologies, qualify the Internet of Things (IoT) information systems to be the natural technological response to the problem solution. With Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs)—based infrastructure for data acquisition and dissemination, these systems have the potential to perform (near) real time and continuous pollution measurements, even in hardly accessible and harsh environments. This can have a great impact to the on-time detection and/or prediction of the pollution sources and hotspots. However, these systems are still not widely deployed because of the actual technological constraints (such as reliability, accuracy, robustness, etc.). This article presents, analyzes and classifies the current technological efforts toward (near) real time low-cost continuous water and air quality monitoring, while being focused mainly on sensing, processing and communication techniques and algorithms for data acquisition and dissemination. It aims to investigate the need for new technologies in this area, their hardware and communication structure, as well as their potential to replace the existing technologies while facing many challenges. Future research, academic and engineering directions on improving of the actual systems are also proposed.