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Distributed Forest Fire Monitoring using Wireless Sensor Networks
Ref: CISTER-TR-150410       Publication Date: 2015

Abstract:
Disaster management is one of the most relevant application fields of wireless sensor networks. In this application, the role of the sensor network usually consists in obtaining a representation or a model of a physical phenomenon spreading through the affected area. In this work we focus on forest fire fighting operations, proposing three fully distributed ways for approximating the actual shape of the fire. In all cases, we assume the existence of an efficient fire detection dissemination layer in charge of broadcasting fire detection events. In the simplest approach, a circular burnt area is assumed around each node that has detected the fire and the union of these circles gives the overall fire’s shape. However, as this approach makes an intensive use of the wireless sensor network resources, we have proposed to incorporate two in-network aggregation techniques, which do not require considering the complete set of fire detections. The first technique models the fire by means of a complex shape composed of multiple convex hulls representing different burning areas, while the second technique uses a set of arbitrary polygons (not necessarily convex). Performance evaluation of realistic fire models on computer simulations reveals that the method based on arbitrary polygons obtains an improvement of 20% in terms of accuracy of the fire shape approximation, reducing the overhead in network resources to the 10% in the best case.

Maria Serna

,

Rafael Casado

,

Aurelio Bermudez

,

Nuno Pereira

,

Stefano Tennina