Detecting Topological Change Using a Wireless Sensor Network

Dynamic geographic phenomena, such as forest fires and oil spills, can have dire environmental, sociopolitical, and economic consequences. Mitigating, if not preventing such events requires the use of advanced spatiotemporal information systems. One such system that has gained widespread interest is the wireless sensor network (WSN), a deployment of sensor nodes – tiny untethered computing devices, which run on batteries and are equipped with one or more commercial off-the-shelf or custom-made sensors and a radio transceiver. This research deals with initial attempts to detect topological changes to geographic phenomena by an environmentally deployed wireless sensor network (WSN). After providing the mathematical and technical preliminaries, we define topological change and present in-network algorithms to detect such changes and also, to manage the WSN’s resources efficiently. The algorithms are compared against a resource-heavy continuous monitoring approach via simulation. The r...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: GISCIENCE
• Authors: Christopher Farah, Cheng Zhong, Michael F. Worboys, Silvia Nittel
• Keywords: Geographic Phenomena, GIS, GISCIENCE 2008, Topological Change, Wireless Sensor Networks