Wireless Sensor Network Based Early Fire Detection System

Abstract

Every year millions of hectares of forest are devastated by fire. Forest fires may occur due to Natural causes or Man-made causes. Natural causes include lightning which set trees on fire, High atmospheric temperatures and dryness (low humidity). Man-made causes include naked flame, cigarette or bidi, electric spark or any source of ignition that comes into contact with inflammable material. Reason could be any, but important is forest fire causes huge damage to forest and nature. Infact, fires on large scales cause air pollution, mar quality of stream water, threaten biodiversity and spoil the aesthetics of an area. Forest fire causes imbalances in nature and endangers biodiversity by reducing faunal and floral wealth. Therefore, there is a need to develop methods for timely detection of forest fire so that damage is minimum. Existed methods for forest monitoring and fire detection are traditional and based on human observation, satellite imaging, use of digital cameras. There are several drawbacks associated with them such as inefficiency, power consumption, latency, accuracy and implementation costs. Therefore, to address these problems the deployment of automatic fire detection system is necessary to allow early and fast fire extinction. In this paper we present an early fire detection system based on Wireless Sensor Network.