An IOT system for environmental monitoring and protecting with heterogeneous communication networks

This paper presents the design, deployment and empirical study of an internet of things (IOT) system, which is used to monitor and protect the living environment of the wildlife. In order to make the system meet the needs of practical applications and adapt to the local various landform characteristic, the communication module of the system is composed to three different communication networks, which supports the protocol of IEEE 802.15.4/ ZigBee networks, IEEE 802.11b WLANs and 3G respectively. The communication cost according to various transmission devices is not equilibrium, it is necessary to design appropriate and effective transmission strategies for the heterogeneous communication network. Especially, the subnetwork constructed by the low power nodes is only powered by discharged batteries. The performance of energy-saving scheme for this type of network is very important, because it will impact on the lifetime of the whole system. Thus we introduce a power management scheme which can reduce the energy expenditure of the system effectively. The working overhead can be reduced to 53.18% under the 95.23% transmission reliability through the analysis of the experimental result.