Forest fire detection wireless sensor node

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks have attracted a great deal of research due to the wide range of applications that are enabled by such networks. Sensor networks are used for ecological monitoring, military surveillance and biomedical detection. This paper describes a design of a wireless sensor node to be used for early forest fire detection; it utilizes the WSN principle where each node is a sensing device with various sensors attached, powered by solar recharging and supports wireless data transmission. Each one of these nodes sends its collected data through the network to reach a sink node. The latter has a direct link with a base station (weather station, civil defence operation room, or scientific research center). The base station analyses the received data and takes the decision accordingly to raise a fire alarm or not. The main parameters involved in the decision making are smoke, CO, temperature, humidity and methane gas. This paper details the design as well as the experimental activities which demonstrated that this device is capable of early forest fire detection.