Wireless Sensor Networks for Conservation and Monitoring Cultural Assets

Recently, technology has become more attractive for industry by paving the way to new applications, which go well beyond traditional sensor applications. These applications can be classified in different categories: monitoring, alerting, healthcare assistance, and actuating, among others. A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is feasible for the heritage scenarios protection and for monitoring because its specificity, autonomy, self-configurability, lasting lifetime, and mobility. However, their services, protocols, and architectures have constraints to support new issues for monitoring cultural assets: geographical dispersion, insufficient resources, and not enough staff to protect all the monuments and to provide tourist information broadcasting. We propose a modular system. It consists of three elements: a WSN, a “Central System,” and a novel platform named “Local Node Gateway.” It allows the coexistence of different wireless technologies in order to provide actuation, processing and communication functionalities. This proposal takes a new approach to solve these heritage-monitoring problems.