Evaluation of wsn technology for dependable monitoring in water environmnts

Tese de mestrado, Engenharia Informática (Arquitetura e Redes de Computadores) Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2019Few problems arise when trying to reliably monitor a surrounding environment by the use of sensors and a wireless network to disseminate the information gathered. In the context of an aquatic environment, the undulation and the low predictability of the surrounding environment could cause faults in the transmission of data. The initial motivation for the work developed in this thesis was the Aquamon project. Aquamon is a project that has as objective the deployment of a dependable Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) for the purposes of water quality monitoring and the study of tidal movements. Therefore, Aquamon, like any other WSN will have to go through the process of choosing a technology that meets its application requirements as well as the requirements imposed by the deployment environment. WSNs can have constraints when it comes to the Quality of Service and availability it can provide. These networks generally have a set requirements that need to be satisfied. Thus, there needs to be a selection of one (or multiple) wireless technologies that can satisfy said requirements. This selection process is usually done in a ad-hoc way, weighting the advantages and disadvantages of different possible solutions with respect to some requirements, often using empirical knowledge or simply dictated by the designer’s preference for some particular technology. When several functional and non-functional requirements have to be addressed, finding an optimal or close to optimal solution may become a hard problem. This thesis proposes a methodology for addressing this optimization problem in an automated way. It considers various application requirements and the characteristics of the available technologies (including Sigfox, LoRa, NB-IoT, ZigBee and ZigBee Pro) and delivers the solution that better satisfies the requirements. It illustrates how the methodology is applied to a specific use case of WSN-based environmental monitoring in the Seixal Bay