A hybrid WSN system for environment monitoring at poultry buildings

Abstract

The environmental quality inside a livestock building is very important for the welfare of the animals and stockmen. Environmental quality is normally assessed by measuring air temperature, relative humidity, and airborne dust concentration. With the advance of wireless communications technologies, it is possible to automatically monitor and control the environmental variables continuously inside a livestock building with low cost and without much human intervention. This paper introduces a system which uses hybrid fixed and mobile wireless sensor network (WSN) technologies to achieve such outcomes. This system consists of a number of fixed sensors to measure the environmental variables, a wireless network gateway and a small mobile vehicle/robot. The fixed sensors are used not only for collecting the environmental data but also positioning the mobile vehicle. The system was implemented and some experiments were carried out at labs at the University of Southern Queensland. Comparing with other methods, the results show that the system can automatically collect accurate environmental data periodically with flexibility and reliability.