A Novel Application in Overhead Power Lines of Wireless Self-Powered Monitoring System for Early Detection of Forest Fires

Forest fires have burned a record 700,000 hectares in the EU in 2022. In this context, additional efforts are required to prevent hazards for humans, property and preserve wildlife. This paper presents a wireless self-powered and distributed sensor system to monitoring forest for the early detection of fire. The approach discusses the preliminary design to take advantage of overhead power lines to deploy a lowcost mesh network around them. A gateway node powered by an energy harvester on a power cable enables the deployment of a mesh network of nodes over a kilometer-long area.