Integration of Autonomous Wireless Sensor Networks in Academic School Gardens

Abstract

In this work, the combination of capabilities provided by Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) with parameter observation in a school garden is employed in order to provide an environment for school garden integration as a complementary educational activity in primary schools. Wireless transceivers with energy harvesting capabilities are employed in order to provide autonomous system operation, combined with an ad-hoc implemented application called MySchoolGardenApp, based on a modular software architecture. The system enables direct parameter observation, data analysis and processing capabilities, which can be employed by students in a cloud based platform. Providing remote data access allows the adaptation of content to specific classroom/homework needs. The proposed monitoring WSN has been deployed in an orchard located in the schoolyard of a primary school, which has been built with EnOcean’s energy harvesting modules, providing an optimized node device as well network layout. For the assessment of the wireless link quality and the deployment of the modules, especially the central module which needs to receive directly the signals of all the sensor modules, simulation results obtained by an in-house developed 3D Ray Launching deterministic method have been used, providing coverage/capacity estimations applicable to the specific school environment case. Preliminary trials with MySchoolGardenApp have been performed, showing the feasibility of the proposed platform as an educational resource in schools, with application in specific natural science course content, development of technological skills and the extension of monitoring capabilities to new context-aware applications.

University Curriculum Setting and Teaching Governance System Based on Distributed Sensor Network

“…After the client receives the data that cannot be processed by the application server, it processes the data again, and after correction, it can be handed over to the application server for processing again. Application server generally has intensive data communication with database server [19]. Application server is the key of multilayer distributed structure system.…”

Analysis of Propagation for Wireless Sensor Networks in Outdoors

“…Some applications of wireless sensor networks, like precision agriculture and prevention of forest fire, are typical examples in which wireless devices are obviously in a vegetation environment either trees, plants, grass, etc. (see [7,[55][56][57]). In this context, for instance, an experimental study has been conducted considering a deployment of a WSN in a forest where the influence of the trunks in the received power by means of a linear regression model has been analyzed [55].…”

“…Nowadays Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have become a mature technology, which is being developed in diverse scenarios from aerospace, terrestrial to underground environments [1][2][3][4][5][6][7], for applications as precision agriculture, smart grids, security, surveillance, habitat monitoring, health sensing and educational activities. The grade of growth of WSNs has allowed the arising of Internet of Things (IoT), which will be incorporated to the next generation of cellular mobile communications also known as 5G [8,9].…”

An Intelligent Failure Detection on a Wireless Sensor Network for Indoor Climate Conditions

“…The main goal of the DSA is to unify multiple devices, services and application in real time, structured and adaptable data model. To achieve this, we employed an embedded system Raspberry Pi 3 as a DSA server to control the system using a distributed server link (DSLink) to enable data exchange with other connected sensor nodes, as a weather web service in the cloud that uses Yahoo Weather API [ 24 ], and a communication protocol for receiving physical sensors data by means of EnOcean®protocol [ 25 , 26 , 27 ]. Figure 1 shows the IoT architecture of the prototype development.…”