A multi-sensor WSN backbone for museum monitoring and surveillance

State-of-the-art systems applied to museums solve specific problems like monitoring the environment for artworks conservation, or detecting specific events to prevent vandalism, theft attempts or unauthorized access. Usually, each problem is solved by a dedicated surveillance system able to face with a single specific task. WSN-based architectures represent a powerful backbone for surveillance thanks to the distributed sensing capabilities, flexibility and easy deployment. Usually, the nodes of the network are equipped with embedded devices that locally acquire the information to be successively aggregated and processed by a central unit. The investigated solution goes beyond sensor limitations since an alternative methodology that exploits also the wireless links among the nodes of the network has been proposed to extract information about visitor presence and movement, as well as intrusions in restricted areas.