A Wireless Sensor Network for Environmental Monitoring of Greenhouse Gases

The rapid development and miniaturization of sensor devices, and the recent advances in wireless communication and networking technologies, are allowing scientists and engineers to develop networks of small sensors that can be used to continuously monitor the health and stability of the environment we live in.Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of a number of spatially distributed sensors with computing, processing and communication capabilities that can continuously sense and transmit data to a base station, where data can be processed and observed in real time.This project provides a detailed study and implementation of a WSN for real time and continuous environmental monitoring of greenhouse gases.A tree-topology WSN consisting of two sensor nodes and a base station was successfully built and tested using open source and inexpensive hardware to measure the concentration level of several greenhouse gases.The sensor nodes consisted of carbon monoxide sensor, a carbon dioxide sensor, a methane sensor, a temperature sensor, a GPS module and a ZigBee wireless transmitter packaged together.The GPS module was added to give information about the location of the sensors.The base stations consisted of an Arduino Uno micro-controller and a ZigBee receiver that can collect data from the various sensors and submit to a sink base station where data can be stored and processed.A website was developed where the captured data can be continuously monitored and displayed in real time.