Sensor Nodes and System Proposal for Security and Environmental Data Collection in Developing Countries

Abstract

This paper consists of RF-based sensor nodes design for survey of critical areas and distance collection of useful environmental data such as pollutants, pluviometry, temperature and humidity. Given poor or nonexistent accesses in areas under investigation, adequate RF equipped sensor nodes are posted at indicated locations for collecting data to be processed by a microcontroller used as a control and processing unit. The processing unit also processes requests from users and sends feedbacks by SMS; those requests and related feedbacks are transmitted through a GSM module. Data from sensors are also processed and corresponding SMS alerts or calls are automatically sent when set parameters are detected. In addition to the use of GSM and microcontroller-based processing unit as in few systems, the proposed system here used RF-based sensor nodes for local area data sensing. That allows real time investigation of given locations. The prototype was successfully developed and tested with specific COTS components such as RF TX/RX433MHz for local area communication, PLL4046 for data formatting to digital, GSM SIM900 for long distance communication, and PIC16F877 microcontroller for data processing.