System architecting and system-on-chip design of intelligent sensor networks for active volcanoes

In this paper, an intelligent surveillance system using sensor networks for monitoring active volcanoes has been presented. While wireless sensor networks can generically be used for a wide variety of applications, breakthrough innovations are most often achieved when driven by a genuine need or application, with its specific system-level and science-related requirements and objectives. Hence, our work focuses on the development of a specific surveillance system for active volcanoes. We combine sensor network system engineering with systems-on-chip implementation to develop an integrated surveillance system called Sensor Networks for Active Volcanoes (SNAV). We report SNAV specific science-related requirements and system-level operations for this surveillance system. Development of the SNAV node system-on-chip (SoC) is then presented. A rapid SoC prototyping of the control and computing subsystem was implemented as an exploratory device based on reconfigurable SoC platform architecture. A low-power radio was developed as an embedded wireless communication core for SNAV system-on-chip designs. The success of this work enables low-power, low-cost sensor networks for intelligent surveillance system applications.