Performance Evaluation of Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks for Forest Fire Detection

Forest fires are catastrophes which threaten the natural and human life. Economical, natural and cultural devastation caused by forest fires render the early detection and prevention of forest fires necessary. The success of a forest fire detection system can be assessed in terms of its accurate and quick detection capabilities. It is observed that wireless sensor networks (WSN) have a higher performance in especially early fire detection and high resolution fire monitoring compared to the existing fire detection systems. Temperature and humidity information of particular forest locations can be measured in real-time through the dense deployment of numerous sensors to a particular forest area and these information can be transmitted to the fire-fighting management center quickly. In this study, we evaluate the performance of a heterogeneous WSN-based architecture consisting of various types of devices, which is proposed in the scope of the FP7 FIRESENSE project to increase the capabilities of WSNs, with realistic fire propagation and network simulation experiments. Furthermore, we present a glance at the real life demonstrations.