Wireless sensor network to detect rainfall induced Landslides

Abstract

Landslides are environmental disasters that cause massive destruction to human life and physical infrastructure. Real-time monitoring of landslide prone areas is necessary to detect the possibility of a landslide and issue a forewarning. In this thesis, we propose the use of wireless sensor networks, one of the most recent technologies that has appeared in the frontier of computer networks, for landslide monitoring, analysis, detection, and warning. There are two main contributions for this dissertation. First is an integrated system for landslide detection. Second is network architecture and techniques for e ective sensing, collecting, aggregating, clustering, and analyzing landslide parameters with limited use of computer and network resources such as energy, memory, and bandwidth. All are validated by real-world deployment and testing. A signi cant outcome of this research is the design, development and deployment of a fully functional wireless sensor network system for landslide detection. The whole system is replicable in other landslide prone areas, with minor changes. The wireless sensor test bed consists of wireless sensors which collect geological and hy- drological properties of the landslide prone area using geophysical sensors such as moisture sensors, pore pressure sensors, strain gauges, tilt meters and geophones. 50 geophysical sensors and 20 wireless sensor nodes have been deployed, and these wireless sensor nodes collect, process and transmit the data to a remote data management center located ap- proximately 300 km away. Since the remote data management center is not located at the deployment site, the wireless sensor network is supplemented by a Wi-Fi network for medium range data transfer as well as a satellite network for long distance data transfer. The requisite algorithms for information processing of the deployed wireless sensor network for landslide scenarios have been designed and developed. ..