Large scale remote sensing for environmental monitoring of infrastructure

Recent developments in wireless sensor technology afford the opportunity to rapidly and easily deploy large-scale, low-cost, and low-power sensor networks across relatively sizeable environmental regions. Furthermore, the advancement of increasingly smaller and less expensive wireless hardware is further complemented by the rapid development of open-source software components. These software protocols allow for interfacing with the hardware to program and configure the onboard processing and communication settings. In general, a wireless sensor network topology consists of an array of microprocessor boards, referred to as motes, which can engage in two-way communication among each other as well as with a base station that relays the mote data to a host computer. The information can then be either logged and displayed on the local host or directed to an http server for network monitoring remote from the site. A number of wireless sensor products are available that offer off-the-shelf network hardware as well as sensor solutions for environmental monitoring that are compatible with the TinyOS open-source software platform. This paper presents an introduction to wireless sensing and to the use of external antennas for increasing the antenna radiation intensity and shaping signal directivity for monitoring applications requiring larger mote-to-mote communication distances.