Data collection and transmission for leisure time boats : based on Arduino WSNs and LTE

Abstract

There has been an astonishing research development in the field of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in the last decade. A large number of low power capacity devices have been implemented in different vehicles, where sensor nodes act as a team to monitor the environment and forecast the potential defects. In this thesis, we aim to design a data collection system using a WSN on a leisure boat in order to monitor and maintain the boat after sale. The designed system aims to collect data from different sensors on board using WSNs and transmits the collected data to a remote server through cellular network. For the WSNs part, we select a low-power driven Adruino Lilypad as a controller and a XBee interface as transceiver for each sensor node in order to provide a reliable data collection mechanism with a low amount of power consumption. Furthermore, to upload the collected data to a remote server, we adopt a 3G/LTE cellular network for the long range wireless communication. We utilize a PandaBoard as a gateway to connect the WSN and the 3G/LTE network. The designed network is implemented and tested in a lab scenario at university and on a Marex boat along the coast.