A Scalable Multitasking Wireless Sensor Network Testbed for Monitoring Indoor Human Comfort

Achieving occupants comfort in built environments is a major goal of modern building automation systems. Nonetheless, even a quantification of human comfort represents a significant challenge because of the number of physical quantities affecting it which, therefore, have to be tracked at suitable spatial and temporal resolution. Wireless sensor and actuator networks are increasingly considered an enabling technology for many monitoring and remote control tasks. Indeed, their reduced intrusiveness, low cost, and low power requirements represent attractive features for the design of monitoring and control infrastructures. In this paper we present a wireless sensor network testbed aimed at monitoring human comfort in a two-century-old building used as university campus. The proposed solution is based on sensor nodes with multitasking capabilities allowing concurrent execution of multiple tasks. Experimental evaluations highlight the flexibility and scalability of the adopted design which allows monitoring of heterogeneous parameters at different rates also permitting the coexistence of event driven and asynchronous operating modes.