Wireless home monitoring system: Design and evaluation

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to present a highly customizable wireless monitoring solution for monitoring of environment characteristics, to evaluate propagation characteristics of wireless signal in inhabited buildings and to discuss important aspects of wireless monitoring systems. We have designed home monitoring system that uses ZigBee wireless sensor network with 8-bit microcontrollers and OS Linux based gateway. User defined code can be added and new sensors can be connected to microcontroller's input/output ports. The evaluation of our design is presented together with results of measurements of ZigBee performance in 2.4 GHz wireless spectrum within a building.