DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK FOR FOREST-FIRE MONITORING USING ZIGBEE

Abstract

Every year forest fires raging in remote areas threaten local communities, and more than often, properties and lives are destroyed. The forest serves not just for economics but also necessary for balance in climate and wild life conservation. Fire, which destroys a vast forest region is usually started either deliberately by people or accidentally in case of lightning strike or other process. In all cases however the origin are small and can be easily controlled in the first few minutes of its beginning. Bushfire monitoring using network of sensors system provides early warning information to necessary service agency for appropriate action. In this project, a wireless sensor network comprising temperature and humidity sensors was designed to interface with ZigBee modules. Two basic designs were carried out; the first was the end device which consisted of chip temperature and humidity sensor, a microcontroller and a ZigBee module. The second design was the coordinator, which consisted of a ZigBee device, a microcontroller and a serial interface for a computer-based Graphical User Interface (GUI) for real-time data acquisition and monitoring. The designs were implemented on PCBs with the microcontrollers programed in C based on algorithms designed for acquisition of measured data from the sensors and communication between the end devices and coordinator using the ZigBee protocol. The GUI was implemented on a computer using visual studio C#. The sensor network was deployed to monitor forest condition for early detection of fire in the forest reserve in Ibadan. The result acquired from the sensors and monitored real-time shows that the system performed favourably well.