Overview / Usage

Idea

Create a network with fixed sensor nodes installed in every livable room on board of any kind of ships , each nodes have an electronic board with a series of sensors for monitoring oxygenation, air quality, temperature and noise levels.
Relief data is essential for safety, health, well-being and comfort onboard for the crew and the passengers.

Description

Continuous technological advances in miniaturization and in the construction of low energy consumption circuits and the continuous progress in the field of information coupled with the high level of efficiency achieved by radio communication devices, increasingly affirm a new technological perspective: Sensor networks (WSN - Wireless sensor network).
This technology arise from the fact that electronic devices are becoming smaller and more complex, and the tendency is to distribute intelligence into objects with relatively lower computing power but strongly related each other, instead of bring it together to a single expensive unit, cumbersome and hardly manageable; The birth of WSN is due to a basic idea which involves the use of a large number of nodes, allowing to perform reliefs and elaborations with greater precision and frequency than the single sensor case of use, capable of providing better performances at detriment of higher costs.
All those premise is the logic from which the project starts, distributing analysis and reliefs among multiple fixed nodes (connected boards) that converge acquired data into defined points connected to data collections center for immediate use in order to be able to intervene in the event of any abnormal values.
Mobile nodes consist essentially of:

• Processor (CPU): usually represented by a microcontroller that performs all management functions, including translation of transducers electrical signals, actuator management and communication control

• Memory: Represents a volatile memory block that acts as an aid to execution

• Transducers: can be more than one, transform some physical dimension (oxygenation, air quality, temperature and noise levels) into an electrical signal

• Actuators: they can be more than one and of a different kind (Leds, acoustic sonar etc ..)

• Communication Unit: Allows inter-node communication

Network description

One of the primary features of this network type is the management of logical addressing and routing of packets.
In a WSN, addressing can follow a particular technique, so the network is partitioned into node clusters and for each cluster it is assigned a unique address.
In every cluster there is a coordinator that collects data from nodes and directs them to the collection center or possibly to the cluster group coordinator to which it belongs.
In this way, the address space is safeguarded while retaining the possibility of referring to certain portions of the network. A typical application example is showed in the picture.
Here, in fact, there is a practical application where clusters are grouped together in a large network. Red-circled knots act as coordinators for top-level clusters, while blue circled nodes act as coordinators for second-level clusters (the largest external ones) until they reach the data collection center.
As for the routing algorithms, it was chosen a proactive typology: this type of algorithm is based on the fact that each node knows the routing information useful to reach each other node. Each network component must have a table that contains all the minimum paths for possible destinations. Of course, this information is updated when network reconfigurations occur, but can also be updated when a node fails (so exclude that node from the tables) or under intense network traffic conditions and possible congestion (perhaps finding alternative paths).

Collaborators