Wildlife Monitoring Using Heterogeneous Wireless Communication Network
Le Zhang, Ze Zhao, Dong Li, Qiang Liu and Li Cui
This paper presents the design, deployment and empirical study of a wildlife monitoring system with heterogeneous wireless communication network. The system mainly helps the zoologist to monitor the elks’ habits, distribution pattern as well as the living environment. In order to meet the demands of practical applications, the system is designed with different wireless communication networks, which supports protocol of IEEE 802.15.4/ ZigBee networks and IEEE 802.11b WLANs. Because of the heterogeneous characteristics of the networks, the energy consumption is different with various communication modules. It is necessary to adapt the appropriate power management scheme according to different communication sub-network. Since the network compose the low power nodes without any energy supply, the performance of energy-saving scheme employed in this network has an influence on lifetime of the whole system. Thus we introduce a power management scheme which can reduce the energy expenditure of the system effectively. The working overhead can be reduced to 53.18% under the 95.23% reliability of the communication from the analysis of the experiment result.
Keywords: heterogeneous wireless network, low duty cycling, wildlife monitoring system, wireless sensor networks, 3G,WiFi, Zigbee.