A low cost framework designed for monitoring applications, based on Wireless Sensor Networks

Even the wireless communication is considered to offer many advantages, compared to wired communication, there are still many constraints to pass over. The domain of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) has been researched for many years, designed, developed and optimized in many directions, but even so there are just a few real life implementations. One major obstacle remains the cost of such a network. The cost of a single node device is considered to be high, which multiplied with the total number of nodes necessary for a network, results to become very high. Since our research project supposes to design and implement a system for monitoring the indoor ambient conditions using a WSN, we have decided to construct a specific framework, including hardware and software, more suitable for our requirements, with minimum cost and having a general format. The general format will permit us to use the framework, with none or minimum modifications, for other types of monitoring applications in the future. On the hardware side the cost has been minimized by using Seeeduino Stalker v2 platform and XBee Series 2 module. This paper presents the proposed framework with its components, offering more details on the most important of them.