AQUAMON – A dependable monitoring platform based on wireless sensor networks for water environments

Abstract

Continuous monitoring of aquatic environments using water sensors is important for several applications related to aquaculture and/or water resources management, as well as for recreational activities. Since sensors are constantly being subjected to potentially strong currents and debris accumulation, and the communication between sensors may be affected by waves and electromagnetic interferences, operating sensors in the water environment presents several chal-lenges to data quality assurance and to dependable monitoring. Thus, it is funda-mental to address these challenges in order to avoid false alarms or ignoring rel-evant events. In this paper we present the AQUAMON project, whose objective is to develop a dependable platform based on WSNs for monitoring in aquatic environments. The project addresses data communication and data quality problems, by per-forming comparative studies of available wireless technologies with respect to aspects with impact on communication quality and deployment cost and propos-ing new data processing approaches to detect sensor and network failures affect-ing data quality and to mitigate the effects of these failures