A Guide Towards Implementing an Effective Forest Fire Detection System: Key Factors and Research Gaps

Forest fires have been one of the major concerns in the world when addressing environmental issues. Dealing with these unfortunate incidents is not that easy because forests are complex terrains. Wireless sensor networks are free from huge infrastructures and hence are best suitable in such scenarios. However, deploying nodes for coverage and communications is a crucial task in such not-so-convenient areas. Therefore, several factors are to be considered while designing such systems, right from deciding the topology of the network, the parameters, environmental factors to the best simulation software which can be used to achieve the best results. This analysis highlights all these factors and presents the most dominant criteria that can be considered while designing such a forest fire detection system. This analysis of the optimal parameters and software tools and considerable research gaps would aid researchers in developing a design methodology for such kind of wireless sensor networks-based forest fire detection systems.