Design Guidelines for Building a Wireless Sensor Network for Environmental Monitoring

Environmental monitoring is a critical process that demands accuracy, reliability and stability at the operation level. Monitoring variables such as temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, soil moisture and ambient light facilitates research in fields such as precision agriculture, habitat monitoring, weather monitoring etc. The use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) provides a technology solution for dynamic and unattended environmental monitoring, under the condition that requirements such as efficient power management and system robustness are satisfied. This paper presents the design and implementation of a WSN for monitoring environmental variables and evaluates its effectiveness. Based on the acquired experience we describe how we have confronted certain problems such as network synchronization and data consistency and we provide certain design guidelines for building such a system.