A Wireless sensor network for early warning of elephant intrusions

Abstract

A wireless sensor network (WSN) specifically designed for detecting elephant intrusions into villages that border wildlife reserves and alerting threatened communities of the location of the same is described. Novel strategies for hardware, firmware and communication have been applied, exploiting the rareness of events to be detected and the low data rates and light traffic load involved, in order to balance power consumption, cost, easy installation and testing in rural areas. Attempts have been made to build in automatic preventive maintenance measures and maintainable by personnel without technical know-how. The paper presents the design of the system and the experimental evaluation of a prototype implementation.