Underground Structure Monitoring with Wireless Sensor Networks

Environment monitoring in coal mines is an important application of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that has commercial potential. We discuss the design of a structure-aware self-adaptive WSN system, SASA. By regulating the mesh sensor network deployment and formulating a collaborative mechanism based on a regular beacon strategy, SASA is able to rapidly detect structure variations caused by underground collapses. A prototype is deployed with 27 Mica2 motes. We present our implementation experiences as well as the experimental results. To better evaluate the scalability and reliability of SASA, we also conduct a large-scale trace-driven simulation based on real data collected from the experiments.

1. Introduction

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a self-organized wireless network composed of a large number of sensor nodes that interact with the physical world [3]. Various low-power and cost-effective sensor platforms have been developed based upon recent advances in wireless communication and micro system technologies. The increasing study of WSNs [4], [20], [21] aims to enable computers to better serve people by automatically monitoring and interacting with physical environments.