Design Methods for a Bushfire Sensor System

Today, wireless technology allows us to connect large number of sensors to form a network, without the inconvenience of wires. These Wireless Sensor Networks can be used to autonomously monitor the environment at a high level of detail. As the sensors improve in battery life, computational power, and communication range, it grows more feasible to consider their use for bushfire detection and data-gathering.

To exploit this new wireless technology, we must investigate how to best utilise them. However, experimentation with actual sensor networks is difficult for a number of reasons. It is costly, and in some cases, impossible to test certain scenarios. For example, we cannot feasably test applications involving extreme fires.

To overcome this problem, we use modelling to create a virtual world to conduct our experiments in. The primary challenge is to be able to produce an accurate model that captures the behaviour of the sensor network and the bushfires on the landscape