Development of Buoy System Instrument using A-WSN ZigBee Protocol for Coastal Ecosystem Monitoring

Ocean observation has become a challenge due to its vast and rough condition. The conventional observation, for example using ship as a mobile platform, is very expensive and inefficient to obtain desired spatial and temporal resolution of sampling. Mooring buoy has been used as one of the options to carry out the task. However the big dimension in the existing buoy system is not suitable for coastal ecosystem monitoring. Rapid development in semiconductor technology has brought wireless sensor network (WSN). ZigBee communication protocol has the advantage of energy efficient and ease of implementation. This research was conducted to developing mooring buoy platform as well as analyzes the possibility of WSN to be implemented in coastal environment. The test on performance of developed mooring buoy was good and stable as the platform of instrument. The network performance of ZigBee radio gave 100% data transmitting and receiving success ratio in the static test. Using four Ni-MH batteries, the instrument can be operated for roughly 39 hours for coordinator and router, and 89 hours for end device. The sea field test shows that the worst is 84.94% success ratio on E1 and the greatest is 100% success ratio on R1 and E3. The received temperature data also accurate to describe the distribution of sea surface temperature at Panggang Island. Results of this study suggest that application of Buoy System instrument using ZigBee-WSN protocol has the potential to be used in the observation activities of coastal ecosystems.