Towards Long-Term Multi-Hop WSN Deployments for Environmental Monitoring: An Experimental Network Evaluation

Abstract

This paper explores the network performance and costs associated with the deployment, labor, and maintenance of a long-term outdoor multi-hop wireless sensor network (WSN) located at the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania (ASWP), which has been in operation for more than four years for environmental data collection. The WSN performance is studied over selected time periods during the network deployment time, based on two different TinyOS-based WSN routing protocols: commercial XMesh and the open-source Collection Tree Protocol (CTP). Empirical results show that the network performance is improved with CTP (i.e., 79% packet reception rate, 96% packet success rate and 0.2% duplicate packets), versus using XMesh (i.e., 36% packet reception rate and 46% packet success rate, with 3%–4% duplicate packets). The deployment cost of the 52-node, 253-sensor WSN is $31,500 with an additional $600 per month in labor and maintenance resulting in a cost of $184 m⁻²·y⁻¹ of sensed area. Network maintenance during the first four years of operation was performed on average every 12 days, costing approximately $187 for each field visit.