Do you know about wireless sensor network technology in environmental monitoring?

In an industry trends outlook article earlier this year, ADI President and CEO Vincent Roche noted that ubiquitous wireless sensor networks and data will be one of the key trends of the future.The combination of advanced materials, enhanced capabilities, and MEMS enables a breakthrough in sensor size and cost, enabling wireless sensor networks to be ubiquitous.He believes that the deployment of wireless mesh network in the Internet of things and industrial applications can add sensing functions to existing systems without a lot of rewiring, and end-to-end security from sensors to the cloud will become the basic requirement for industrial users to deploy industrial Internet of things on a large scale.

Lorry Liang, marketing director for power products in China, said at the ADI media event that the company's SmartMesh wireless network solution has been used successfully in a number of industrial and environmental applications, including water quality monitoring in erhai lake, yunnan province.Recently, the company once again publicly announced a number of typical application cases, including several environmental monitoring applications, the author sorted out these successful cases, hope to see new ideas of environmental monitoring technology.

How are precious water supplies predicted?

Whether thermal power generation, agricultural, industrial or hydroelectric production, snow cover, and surface water stored in snow each year are critical to the U.S. economy because such water users contribute $1.7 trillion (15%) to U.S. gross domestic product each year.In addition, snow cover information can be used to predict droughts and floods, distribute water equally between the public and private sectors of the economy, and is critical for agricultural planning.

However, the processes that govern snow cover, snowmelt, and surface water are not well known to the public because they are difficult to measure.Until recently, researchers relied on wired sensors deployed sporadically in remote locations with steep terrain and extreme conditions, including flash floods, deep snow, temperatures below freezing, and places with animals that liked to nibble on cables.These wired networks are too expensive, unreliable, difficult to maintain, and too few data points to create a catchment situation map.

A team at the university of California, Berkeley, trying to explore the way to improve large-scale environmental monitoring, and turn to wireless sensor network in order to understand whether the technique can achieve a more efficient, scalable and solid solution, this solution need to have multiple nodes within the same radio spectrum, even for the high frequency data transmission can also run on batteries for at least a year, and can be normal operation in very harsh environment.

While they found that many commercial wireless systems can transmit data between two points, the hardware often includes relatively powerful radios that require more power than batteries alone can provide.In addition, they found that a typical point-to-point transmission system operates independently, and that if multiple links are deployed too closely (i.e., overlapping radio transmission ranges), there will be harmful radio interference between nodes.

ADI's Dust Networks SmartMesh WSN technology was eventually brought to the project team's attention due to its long battery life, intelligent networking features and scalability.The ultra-low power 802.15.4 SmartMesh node provides years of battery life.SmartMesh network manager provides built-in technology to create an automatically formed, self-healing, multi-hop grid network.In fact, these features are not standard in most wireless sensor networks.

The communication system consists of two wireless nodes and a network manager.These nodes have highly integrated hardware and configurable software interfaces for simple integration.The node transmits data every 15 minutes from the remote sensor group responsible for measuring snow depth, solar radiation, relative humidity, soil moisture and substrate water potential, and temperature.Some nodes are connected directly to the sensor group, while others are used as "relay stations" to improve the reliability of data transmission through ridges, outcrops and forests.

Smart parking solutions effectively reduce urban traffic flow and pollution

It is estimated that 30% of urban traffic is caused by drivers looking for parking Spaces.In a study measuring traffic flow in a small area of Los Angeles, researchers found that drivers driving more than 950,000 miles in search of a parking space produced 730 tons of carbon dioxide emissions and consumed 47,000 gallons of gasoline.The difficulty and randomness of finding an empty space can lead to time wasting, traffic congestion, road rage and pollution.Parking enforcement in cities is also an inefficient and labor-intensive effort, and locking up offenders in this way is like the proverbial "needle in a haystack."

The ideal solution, of course, would be to be able to collect data from individual parking Spaces in real time, but this is not an easy task.It is impossible to arrange power and communication lines for each parking space, and the same is true for frequent battery changes.As a result, the solution requires wireless technology and must be able to rely on batteries that run for years at a time.Urban roads are also bad for radio-frequency transmission.Cars, trucks, trucks, and buses form continuous and dynamic barriers that skew, reflect, and attenuate radio signals.

Streetline Networks, an innovative green company, chose SmartMesh wireless mesh network technology to solve this problem effectively.The company's smart parking solutions integrate the SmartMesh product into its surface-mounted and embedded sensors, which contain a range of sensing components and logic devices to manage the data collected at individual parking Spaces.

SmartMesh's proven and advanced RF flexibility enables Streetline to reliably transmit road data in real time to its network-based parking management suite.These apps can tell drivers where to find a parking space, send a text message to the driver when the parking time is approaching according to the parking meter, or even direct the parking law enforcement officer to the parking place that takes up the parking space beyond the time limit.Streetline Networks is now widely used in cities including New York, Los Angeles, calver city (CA), fort worth, and asheville.

Analysis of several key technical characteristics of environmental monitoring

There are several key reasons for the adoption of SmartMesh wireless sensor networks, both for erhai lake water quality monitoring and the two environmental monitoring projects Shared here:

Dynamic and scalable network.It supports large, dense, multi-hop grid networks that can be automatically formed and easily extended. It also provides security management, detailed network statistics for optimizing sensor layouts, deterministic nodal power management, and dynamic network optimization with built-in network state monitoring.

Easy to deploy and simple to configure.Long battery life, intelligent network manager and rugged scalability.The SmartMesh network provides the necessary flexibility and reliability for harsh urban environments and uncertain outdoor environments.

99.99% high stability.The SmartMesh product line has been field-proven to be a complete grid network solution with stability even in the most demanding environments.It USES time-synchronized grid protocol to provide network flexibility, reliability and scalability, as well as advanced network management and comprehensive security features.

Low power consumption makes maintenance cost lower.By further improving battery efficiency through load balancing and optimization, the time needed for maintenance can be pushed back.Ultra-low power consumption technology allows network nodes to run for years on two AA batteries.