A Wi-Fi cluster based wireless sensor network application and deployment for wildfire detection

Abstract

We introduce the wireless sensor network (WSN) data harvesting application we developed for wildfire detection and the experiments we have performed. The sensor nodes are equipped with temperature and relative humidity sensors. They are organized into clusters and they communicate with the cluster heads using 802.15.4/ZigBee wireless links. The cluster heads report the harvested data to the control center using 802.11/Wi-Fi links. We introduce the hardware and the software architecture of our deployment near Rhodiapolis, an ancient city raising on the outskirts of Kumluca county of Antalya, Turkey. We detail our technical insights into the deployment based on the real-world data collected from the site. We also propose a temperature-based fire detection algorithm and we evaluate its performance by performing experiments in our deployment site and also in our university. We observed that our WSN application can reliably report temperature data to the center quickly and our algorithms can detect fire events in an acceptable time frame with no or very few false positives.