Design and Implementation of a Low Cost Wireless Sensor Network using Arduino and nRF24L01(+)

Wireless communication is rapidly growing, making it possible to design wireless network systems that can constantly collect, analyze, evaluate and validate our environment to get more control of the factors that influence it. With over a decade of intensive research and development, wireless sensor network technology has been emerging as a viable solution to many innovative applications. In this paper, we describe a wireless sensor network system that we have developed using open-source hardware platform, Arduino. The system is low-cost and highly scalable both in terms of the type of sensors and the number of sensor nodes, which makes it well suited for a wide variety of applications related to environmental monitoring. Unlike wired network designs, wireless network designs create more flexibility in handling these environmental issues. For this reason, a wireless sensor network system that is capable of handling this situation is implemented. Overall system architecture and the design of hardware and software components are presented in details in this paper. Keywords— Arduino; nRF24L01 transceiver; Wireless Sensor Network; Coordinator node; Super node; Sensor node; Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI)