Flexible and Efficient Wireless Sensor Networks for Detecting Rainfall-Induced Landslides

Abstract

The effect of climate change and human activities leads to a series of dangerous phenomena, such as landslides and flood. In such a context, building a system to monitor environmental hazards is seriously needed. Some studies propose to use wireless sensor network (WSN) technique for landslide monitoring systems. Two important factors for these systems are the flexibility and the energy management. This paper focuses on the development of a flexible and efficient WSN for detecting rainfall-induced landslides. A flexible switching between star and tree topologies is used to adapt to weather conditions in order to maximize the reliability of the transmission. Moreover, the power management is designed concurrently with the weather condition to improve both the operation reliability and the power efficiency. The performance of our designed WSN is evaluated by both simulation and outdoor experiment. Detailed calculation of the power budget is presented thoughtfully to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.