Design and Evaluation of an Open-Source Wireless Mesh Networking Module for Environmental Monitoring

Wireless mesh networking extends the communication range among cooperating multiple low-power wireless radio transceivers and is useful for collecting data from sensors widely distributed over a large area. By integrating an off-the-shelf wireless design, such as the XBee module, development of sensor systems with mesh networking capability can be accelerated. This study introduces an open-source wireless mesh network (WMN) module, which integrates the functions of network discovery, automatic routing control, and transmission scheduling. In addition, this design is open source in order to promote the use of wireless mesh networking for environmental monitoring applications. Testing of the design and the proposed networking module is reported. The proposed wireless mesh networking module was evaluated and compared with XBee. The average package delivery ratio and standard deviation of the proposed WMN module and the XBee are 94.09%, 91.19%, 5.14%, and 10.25%, respectively, in a 20 node experiment. The proposed system was demonstrated to have the advantages of low-cost combined with high reliability and performance, and can aid scientists in implementing monitoring applications without the complications of complex wireless networking issues.