Terrestrial Wireless Infrastructure integrated with Satellite Telecommunications for E-Rural
The objective of TWISTER is to support the development and widespread adoption of satellite communication services to deliver broadband services for rural areas. TWISTER will provide innovative applications meeting the specific needs of rural user communities including local administrations, educational institutions, health care practitioners, Sees and agricultural communities. More info here...
TWISTER in Industrial and Environmental Monitoring
MEAG intends to develop and deploy application demonstrating the usefulness of the TWISTER concept. We would like to apply the TWISTER network to sensor-based industrial and environmental monitoring. The underlying field of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is rapidly developing and is considered a key technology of the future; we believe that integrating WSN with TWISTER would add great value to the latter.
Consider deploying a number of tiny nodes (a sensor field) in some area of interest (e.g., a production facility, rural area, forest). Each node is equipped with sensors, basic computing capability, and wireless connectivity. Quantities being sensed may include temperature, humidity, pressure, noise, air pollution, soil acidity, etc. The goal is to (a) acquire information about the monitored phenomenon over the entire area of interest (sensor field), (b) locally (at the nodes) preprocess the information, if needed, and (c) collect the information from all the nodes at a central server location for display or further processing.
As the nodes are battery powered, it is essential that they use as little energy as possible. Therefore, the wireless connectivity of an individual node should be based on a very low power radio link. A perfect choice is the new low-rate, low-power wireless personal area network (WPAN) standard, IEEE 802.15.4. It is designed specifically for such applications.
The radio link allows each node to talk to its close neighbors; in order to go beyond the range of the radio link the nodes must assume the role of routers (forward messages). A multi-hop ad-hoc network is thus formed. Sensor readings are usually routed towards a special node acting as a gateway to a wide area network (e.g., equipped with both an IEEE 802.15.4 interface and a WLAN interface). Once the sensor data received by the gateway, they can be transferred over the WAN (e.g., the Internet) to the central server.
If the gateway node is indeed equipped with a WLAN interface, the TWISTER network can be a perfect means to transfer the sensor data to a central server over the Internet. WUT would like to demonstrate this by implementing an industrial monitoring system at ACO. The configuration to be realized is shown in Fig. 1. Three ACO facilities (ACO Production, ACO Store, and ACO Logistics) are monitored. Each facility is instrumented with a number of sensor nodes, a gateway, and a TWISTER AP (access point). Each sensor node senses temperature, humidity, and noise level. Within each facility the sensor nodes communicate among themselves using the IEEE 802.15.4 interface. As described above, they form an ad-hoc network delivering all the sensor data to the gateway. The gateway, which is WLAN-enabled, transfers the data to the TWISTER AP, which transfers them to another TWISTER AP, located at the ACO Office. The data is then forwarded to the TWISTER SAT link equipment and then, over the Internt, to a central server located at the Faculty of Electronics and Information Technology (WUT). The server makes the data available to a WWW client through a convenient interface. MEAG intends to make this system fully operational.
Note that the above setup is only a representative of a broad class of TWISTER-based monitoring applications. Their generic configuration is shown in Fig. 2. Others include monitoring pollution levels in rural areas or detecting fires in a forest. As similar technical solutions can be used in most of them, the proof-of-concept experiment to be carried out by WUT will demonstrate the applicability and benefits of TWISTER to the entire field of industrial and environmental monitoring.
