Discipline: Technology and Engineering
Subcategory: Electrical Engineering
Tam Le - University of the District of Columbia
Co-Author(s): Sasan Haghani, University of the District of Columbia, Washington, DC
Globally, a dramatic demographic shift towards urbanization is occurring. Between 2000 and 2050, the proportion of people living in urban areas is projected to rise from 46.6% to 69.6%. Urbanization poses problems through effects such as environmental pollution, accidents, heat island effects and climate change. With the rapid urban growth and development, the quality of green space available has been degrading. Furthermore, many land characteristics have been altered such that the whole water cycle has been significantly changed. Some of the considerable adverse effects of these changes include the increase in runoff which leads to flooding and poor quality of receiving waters. To improve storm water management, green infrastructures (GI) have become a promising solution by restoring the natural environments in big cities.
In this paper, a wireless sensor network was designed for the monitoring of green infrastructure in smart cities. Wireless sensor networks, use various communication protocols such as WiFi, WiMax and ZigBee. While ZigBee is a commonly used communication protocol in wireless sensor networks, ZigBee operates in the 2.4GHz band which is shared with many other communication systems such as WiFi and is hence susceptible to interference. In addition, ZigBee has limited communications range and is not suitable for a wireless sensor network designed for monitoring of GIs, where a large communication range is desirable, and the base station might not be in the vicinity of the GIs. In the proposed WSN for GI, a DASH7-based communication system was implemented whose communication range is 6 times that of a ZigBee-based WSN and can also provide much longer battery life. The DASH7-based WSN, integrated with a variety of sensors, including temperature, light and pressure was designed and tested where sensor data was successfully transmitted and displayed on a Cloud server.
Not SubmittedFunder Acknowledgement(s): This research was supported by the National Science Foundation Grant # HRD1435947.
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Sasan Haghani, shaghani@udc.edu
Role: I was responsible for all the research performed. I designed and implemented the system and wrote the abstract.