A Data Gathering System for the Arctic Tundra

Abstract

Climate change has emerged as an important topic over the past decade, and one of the areas most susceptible to change is the Arctic Tundra. Monitoring the environment features a variety of challenges; it’s remote location, manual monitoring equipment and required permission to depart on expeditions. A solution to this is the use of a wireless sensor network to allow more automatic gathering of data. Many algorithms to increase the life span of nodes have been proposed over the years, such as LEACH and PEGASIS. However, these make assumptions that does not fit the Arctic Tundra.

This thesis proposes a system design which minimizes message propagation as it aims to overcome the networking challenges, while also limiting energy consumption. The system consists of two types of nodes; normal sensor nodes, and relay nodes which communicates with a base station. Relay nodes will inform others of its presence and set paths are created through the system so all nodes can propagate their data. Some of the challenges with simulating such a system is explored, and it is implemented on top of an event-based simulator.

Experiments are run to evaluate the energy consumption of the system using a combined energy model from LEACH and ESDS, as well as the scalability of the simulator. The results showcase that most of the energy is expended by being awake, and a very small part is due to sending messages. Additionally, it means that the proposed system is mainly viable for smaller networks with sparsely placed nodes. No real conclusion can be made about the model scalability results, other than increasing the simulated time will increase the simulation run-time. As an example, a year can be simulated by running for approximately 30 minutes.

Finally, due to messages being such a small part of the energy consumption, this opens up for many interesting approaches. The main one presented being mesh networks, as this allows algorithms such as LEACH and PEGASIS to overcome the networking assumptions as the problems of routing is handled in an underlying network layer.