Hierarchical Early Wireless Forest Fire Prediction System Utilizing Virtual Sensors

Deploying thousands of sensors across remote and challenging environments—such as the Amazon rainforest, Californian wilderness, or Australian bushlands—is a critical yet complex task for forest fire monitoring, while our backyard emulation confirmed the feasibility of small-scale deployment as a proof of concept, large-scale scenarios demand a scalable, efficient, and fault-tolerant network design. This paper proposes a Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Network (HWSN) deployment strategy with adaptive head node selection to maximize area coverage and energy efficiency. The network architecture follows a three-level hierarchy as follows: The first level incorporates cells of individual sensor nodes that connect to dynamically assigned cell heads. The second level involves the aggregated clusters of such cell heads, each with an assigned cluster head. Finally, dividing all cluster heads into regions, each with a region head, directly reports all the collected information from the forest floor to a central control sink room for decision making analysis. Unlike traditional centralized or uniformly distributed models, our adaptive approach leverages a greedy coverage maximization algorithm to dynamically select head nodes that contribute to the best forest sensed data coverage at each level. Through extensive simulations, the adaptive model achieved over 96.26% coverage, using significantly fewer nodes, while reducing node transmission distances and energy consumption. This facilitates the real-world deployment of our HWSN model in large-scale, remote forest regions, with very promising performance.