Development of a self-sustainable autonomous environmental monitoring system

Acquiring continuous observation results is an essential demand to environmental monitoring. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), composed of many tiny sensing devices, give a good solution to collect continuously temporal and spatial data. There are many challenges for WSN, such as sizes of wireless sensors, cost, energy, processing capability, and transmission distance. For environmental monitoring, the most important issue is the source of energy, because there might not have sufficient energy sources in wild fields. Thus, we need a solution to overcome the energy problem. Serving as a solution, a self-sustainable autonomous system equipped with an energy-efficiency embedded system as the gateway and a sensor node whose power is supplied by a solar cell is purposed. The embedded based gateway provides a user-friendly interface. It also solves the problem of limited energy sources by connecting a solar cell to the sensor node, so that the energy for the node can be continuously supplied under adequate exposure to the sun. The goal of long-term monitoring can be achieved using such a design.