Wireless Sensor Networks for Marine Environment Monitoring

This work reports on the experience gained in the context of the development of a system of wireless sensor networks for marine environment monitoring, as a part of the GeoGrid project. The proposed system employs a monitoring network composed of commonly available motes, equipped with sensors for monitoring water quality in restricted marine environments. Those lowerend nodes communicate among each other whenever possible, but rely on higher-performance nodes implementing the Data MULE paradigm for delivering information to the remote base station in the not so uncommon event of a disconnection in the network. This paper describes the hardware and software architecture of the employed nodes, and the operations of the resulting hybrid network, and gives some details on the testbed deployment.