Studying the feasibility of IEEE 802.15.4-Based WSNs for gas and fire tracking applications through simulation

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have proliferated significantly in recent years. Nowadays they are used in many fields, such as military, environmental and industrial. Reliability and low latency are desirable characteristics of many WSN applications. In particular, time-critical WSN applications must be able to act according to the observed changes in the environment as quickly as possible, assuring that the information collected by the sensor nodes is correct. In these applications the response time is a critical factor. In this paper, we focus on WSN monitoring applications for both indoor and outdoor environments. We propose a near real-time monitoring system based on binary detection sensor that offers delay bounded tracking of events, such as gas and fire. The performance of gas and fire tracking applications is evaluated using the IEEE 802.15.4 technology and a routing scheme for WSNs that relies on sink announcements for route discovery. The proposed routing protocol is tuned to introduce the lowest possible end-to-end delay to data packet delivery, by reducing control traffic to a minimum. To evaluate the performance, we develop both gas and fire propagation models for a framework that allows simulating emergency events, thus allowing us to determine the degree of accuracy achieved in the monitoring process.