Designing Low-Cost, Low-Power Circuits to Support Real-Time, Remote Distributed Environmental Sensing Using GSM Networks

Internet of Things enables real time monitoring of environmental data. There is an opportunity to collect data in remote areas where real time data was previously unavailable. Ideally we would like to both collect and communicate that data in real time. However communication over GSM networks relies upon power-intensive cell radios which severely limits the ability to deploy sensors for periods of time over one week. In this paper, we discuss an approach to unattended long-term deployment of an environmental sensor using GSM networks to communicate data in real time. We propose a custom power circuit that reduces power consumption rather than depend upon the low power modes of MCU. This approach greatly extends the time a sensor can be deployed with a commodity battery without manual intervention. We present both the circuit design and its evaluation.