A Wireless Sensor Network for Fire Detection and Alarm System

Fire can really be devastating to properties if improperly managed, it is due to this problem that the fire detection and alarm systems were sought for. However, traditional fire alarm system is based on a wiring network which have drawbacks and limitations such as inflexibility of the FDAS layout plan during building construction, and difficulties in renovation where the removal and relocation of traditional FDAS requires additional amount of work. To address these problems, a fire detection and alarm system that is based on wireless sensor network was developed. The FDAS is mainly composed of a fire detection node, a fire alarm node, and a fire alarm control panel. The wireless communication of the nodes was achieved using XBee as the wireless transceiver. The significant characteristic of XBee is the mesh routing protocol which helps the system to be more robust and flexible. The fire alarm control panel is a LabVIEW based program that utilizes the state machine architecture which follows the detect-evaluate-store algorithm. In evaluating the overall system, results illustrate the network of nodes adapts to its location and connects to other nodes whenever it is within their range. Furthermore, the average response time of each detection node with respect to the fire alarm control panel is below the standard of 10-second as stated by the National Fire Alarm and Signaling Code.