Fusion-based volcanic earthquake detection and timing in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Volcano monitoring is of great interest to public safety and scientific explorations. However, traditional volcanic instrumentation such as broadband seismometers are expensive, power hungry, bulky, and difficult to install. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) offer the potential to monitor volcanoes on unprecedented spatial and temporal scales. However, current volcanic WSN systems often yield poor monitoring quality due to the limited sensing capability of low-cost sensors and unpredictable dynamics of volcanic activities. In this article, we propose a novel quality-driven approach to achieving real-time, distributed, and long-lived volcanic earthquake detection and timing. By employing novel in-network collaborative signal processing algorithms, our approach can meet stringent requirements on sensing quality (i.e., low false alarm/missing rate, short detection delay, and precise earthquake onset time) at low power consumption. We have implemented our algorithms in TinyOS and conducted extensive evaluation on a testbed of 24 TelosB motes as well as simulations based on real data traces collected during 5.5 months on an active volcano. We show that our approach yields near-zero false alarm/missing rate, less than one second of detection delay, and millisecond precision earthquake onset time while achieving up to six-fold energy reduction over the current data collection approach.