SensorScope: Out-of-the-Box Environmental Monitoring

An important field of application for wireless sensor networks is environmental monitoring. Given the importance of potential climate changes, environmental impact on cities, and pollution, it is an application domain where sensor networks can have great impact and as such is getting more and more attention. Current data collection techniques are indeed rather limited and make use of very expensive sensing stations, leading to a lack of appropriate observations. In this paper, we present SensorScope, a collaborative project between environmental and network researchers, that aims at providing an efficient and cheap out-of-the-box environmental monitoring system based on a wireless sensor network. We especially focus on data gathering and present the hardware and network architecture of SensorScope. We also describe a real-world deployment, which took place on a rock glacier in Switzerland, as well as the results we obtained.