A wireless sensor node for river monitoring using MSP430® and energy harvesting

A microcontroller is the most important component of a wireless sensor node, also called mote. It has to perform the measurements using the integrated peripherals, to post process the measured data as well as to coordinate the data transport of the wireless sensor network (WSN). The lowest possible power consumption is also a key requirement. The MSP430™ microcontroller family from Texas Instruments® enables a high processing power at low power consumption. This work demonstrates the flexibility of the microcontroller that is needed to adapt a mote to a specific application area. In this case, the application area is river monitoring. One requirement is a perpetual operation using energy harvesting. This work presents the first water level monitoring platform only using ultracapacitors as energy storage elements to compensate the irregularity of environmental energy sources. It shows how perpetual operation can be enabled by versatile high-performance and low-power modes of the MSP430.

[1]  Biswanath Mukherjee,et al.  Wireless sensor network survey , 2008, Comput. Networks.

[2]  Christian Steger,et al.  Simulation Based Verification of Energy Storage Architectures for Higher Class Tags supported by Energy Harvesting Devices , 2007, 10th Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design Architectures, Methods and Tools (DSD 2007).

[3]  Mani B. Srivastava,et al.  Design considerations for solar energy harvesting wireless embedded systems , 2005, IPSN 2005. Fourth International Symposium on Information Processing in Sensor Networks, 2005..

[4]  John Daniels,et al.  Java™ on the bare metal of wireless sensor devices: the squawk Java virtual machine , 2006, VEE '06.

[5]  David E. Culler,et al.  Telos: enabling ultra-low power wireless research , 2005, IPSN 2005. Fourth International Symposium on Information Processing in Sensor Networks, 2005..

[6]  David E. Culler,et al.  Perpetual environmentally powered sensor networks , 2005, IPSN 2005. Fourth International Symposium on Information Processing in Sensor Networks, 2005..

[7]  D. Puccinelli,et al.  Wireless sensor networks: applications and challenges of ubiquitous sensing , 2005, IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine.

[8]  Katia Obraczka,et al.  SEA-LABS: A Wireless Sensor Network for Sustained Monitoring of Coral Reefs , 2007, Networking.

[9]  Roger Moore,et al.  Real-Time River Level Monitoring Using GPS Heighting , 2000, GPS Solutions.