A Mobile Climate Sensor

Comprehensive study of climate diversity and habitat monitoring throughout the Sonoma County cannot simply be extrapolated from a few existing individual climate stations in the region. An alternative approach is deploying dense sensor networks in various areas of interest and habitat patches in the county. In fact, over the past decade there have been many efforts for outdoor deployment of wireless networks for making and recording ecological measurements. However, deployment and maintenance of such networks can create daunting technological challenges. Another approach to study microclimates is to use distributed sensors carried by mobile users. For this project, we introduce a based climate monitoring network implemented around the Copeland Creek in Sonoma County, which is ZigBee-based on the concept of delay-tolerant networking (DTN).

This paper proposes a delay-tolerant based mobile sensing network called Sonoma County Geo-Sensor Network (SoNET) for monitoring microclimates. The network uses ZigBee-based communication protocols and mobile nodes can exchange data and ensure data penetration to a weather server. Through experimental measurements, we demonstrate that the mobile network can be an effective alternative to deploying expensive individual climate stations or challenging dense sensor networks. We also evaluate the performance of our proposed protocols for data exchange between mobile nodes. See SoNET: A Delay-Tolerant Geo-sensor Network for Environmental Monitoring for more information.