Case study of a simple, low power WSN implementation for forest monitoring

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are being used in growing numbers for monitoring industrial fields, agriculture storage and environment. The building bricks of these networks are the sensor nodes, which makes the design of the nodes a very important task. During the development a trade-off between complexity, functionality, power consumption and of course time and financial aspects has to be made. In this paper we are going to present our WSN which is designed for monitoring forest fires; low cost, low power consumption and flexibility in mind. Microchip PIC18F4685 MCU, Silicon Laboratories Si4432 ISM Band transceiver are the core components of the implementation. The basic functional principles and the results of the power consumption measurement are also presented.