Environmental Monitoring Based on the Wireless Sensor Networking Technology: A Survey of Real-World Applications

This paper investigates real-life environmental monitoring applications based on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Wireless sensor networking is an emerging technology, which through the research in the labs and the real deployments has proved to be a significant and valuable tool for scientists in their effort to explore various environmental phenomena. During the last decades, this wireless networking technology has been adopted by many scientific fields in order to accurately and effectively monitor climate phenomena such as air pollution, destruction phenomena (i.e., landslides), etc. It has also been widely used in agriculture as well as in horticulture for field monitoring. This paper provides a critical overview of the basic components existing WSN deployments use. It also categorizes these deployments, 111 in total, into five different field categories, namely agricultural monitoring, environmental monitoring, air-water pollution monitoring, monitoring of destruction phenomena, as well as monitoring of livestock, and wild animal, in order to provide a general view of the technologies used, the conditions under which the deployments were conducted, and much more. Then, five easy-to-use guides are provided discussing basic considerations for deploying WSNs in each of these fields. These guides cover various issues, such as sensor node platforms, operating systems (OSs), topologies, installation and maintenance issues, and much more. In order to showcase the usefulness of consulting the resulted guides, this work considers representative application scenarios for each of these field deployments.