Wireless sensor networks are expected to automatically monitor the ecological evolution and wildlife habits in forests. Low-power links (transceivers) are often adopted in wireless sensor network applications, in order to save the precious sensor energy and then achieve long-term, unattended monitoring. Recent research has presented some performance characteristics of such low-power wireless links under laboratory or outdoor scenarios with less obstacles, and they have found that low-power wireless links are unreliable and prone to be affected by the target environment. However, there is still less understanding about how well the low-power wireless link performs in real-world forests and to what extent the complex in-forest surrounding environments affect the link performances. In this paper, we empirically evaluate the low-power links of wireless sensors in three typical different forest environments. Our experiment investigates the performance of the link layer compatible with the IEEE 802.15.4 standard and analyzes the variation patterns of the packet reception ratio (PRR), the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) and the link quality indicator (LQI) under diverse experimental settings. Some observations of this study are inconsistent with or even contradict prior results that are achieved in open fields or relatively clean environments and thus, provide new insights both into effectively evaluating the low-power wireless links and into efficiently deploying wireless sensor network systems in forest environments.
Corrosion monitoring is highly needed in concrete-steel civil engineering applications. By the corrosion information captured from structures, field experts can deduce where the corrosion events occur and how they will possibly evolve. However, traditional approaches are either based on high-cost manual operations or unable to support user's control once the data collection starts. This article presents a corrosion-monitoring framework, called CoCoMo, based on embedded sensing and wireless networking technologies, aimed at achieving long-term and controllable corrosion monitoring. CoCoMo involves corrosion-detecting devices, well-designed wireless networking protocols, and the visual user interface which not only displays collected corrosion data but also serves as command-issuing agent. We finally build a small-scale test-bed to evaluate the feasibility and the transmission reliability of CoCoMo.
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