Design of smart sensing component for volcano monitoring

With the growing number of wireless sensor network (WSN) monitoring systems in outdoor environments, smart sensing capability has attracted great research interests recently: scientists and researchers expect long-term healthy systems running in harsh environments. Because of the environmental damages to less-protected sensors, a sensing component, is highly desirable to be robust and faithful for high data fidelity. In this paper, we propose a smart sensing design solution aimed to help acquire real-time, faithful scientific monitoring data from the active volcano, Mt. St. Helens. Our smart sensing design provides services of online-configurable sensor driver, fault detection, data prioritization and time synchronization. It could be applied to sensing component design in multiple wireless sensor network applications. This design solution has been implemented on a test-bed of sixteen OASIS prototype sensor nodes.