Energy-Efficient WSN Architecture for Illegal Deforestation Detection

We present an energy-efficient wireless sensor network (WSN) architecture tailored for illegal deforestation detection. Illegal deforestation is a world-wide problem which may be prevented through improved monitoring of forested areas utilizing sensor networks equipped with chain-saw detection. Additional to detection, we identify sound source localization and sensor node localization as essential features of a deforestation monitoring WSN, and analyze two possible architectures which perform sound source localization with the distributed time difference-of-arrival (TDOA) algorithm and microphone-array based localization respectively. We develop an energy model and evaluate the two architectures. Our results indicate that the microphone array based WSN requires more hardware and is more complex, but is an order of magnitude more energy efficient than the distributed TDOA WSN as it minimizes radio traffic. This improvement in efficiency enables the microphone array equipped WSN to potentially operate for over a year, enabling practical deforestation monitoring with WSNs.