Environmental gas sensing in complex environments

Abstract

This paper describes a proposed dynamically reconfigurable sensor networking topology for hardware efficient gas sensing system for complex environments. The network is initially established with a predetermined star topology, but depending on the measured parameters at any given node, a small mesh connected sub network is established in the geographic vicinity of the node with deviated parameters. This modified part of the network nodes still have the star connection with the base station, but have their own mesh connected sub net until the measure parameters returned to normal. The proposed reconfigurable network may have different nodes on the same main network measuring same parameters at different time resolution. This depends on the need for measurement to gather more accurate information of gas conditions at a certain location where the readings have deviated from the expected band. This dynamic reconfigurable feature prevent all the network nodes turning into more rapid measurement unnecessarily when only a part of the network geographic area is affected by high gas concentrations. Thus it optimizes the energy usage of the entire network.