A wireless sensor network for rainfall monitoring, using cellular network: A case for namibia

Abstract

Environmental monitoring provides data for expert managers to predict and understand nature of change. Environmental issues are also an important part of people's quality of life and the advance of civilization. Traditional methods of monitoring some environmental parameters such as physically collecting rainfall data from stations can be burdensome and inhibiting the monitoring required for careful assessment. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) offer high quality monitoring at a very low unit cost in terms of capital and labor invested. This paper describes a WSN-enabled architecture for a tipping bucket rain gauge system to collect and transmit real time data using General Pocket Radio Service (GPRS) via a cellular network. The data is sent from remote Rain Gauge (RG) stations to a public web server known as the Weather Underground (WU).