An Environmental Monitoring System with Integrated Wired and Wireless Sensors Jue Yang, Chengyang Zhang, Xinrong Li, Yan Huang, Shengli Fu, and Miguel Acevedo University of North Texas, Denton, Texas 76207, USA {jy0074,cz0022,xinrong,huangyan,fu,acevedo}@unt.edu Abstract. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) technology has great poten- tial to revolutionize many science and engineering domains. We present a novel environmental monitoring system with a focus on the overall sys- tem architecture for seamless integration of wired and wireless sensors for long-term, remote, and near-real-time monitoring. We also present a unified framework for sensor data collection, management, visualization, dissemination, and exchange, conforming to the new Sensor Web Enable- ment standard. Some initial field testing results are also presented. 1 Introduction Environmental monitoring applications have become major driving forces for wireless sensor networks (WSN) [1,2]. Ecological and environmental scientists have been developing a cyber infrastructure in the form of environmental obser- vatories, consisting of a variety of sensor systems, sophisticated computational resources and informatics, to observe, model, predict, and ultimately help pre- serve the health of the natural environment. Such an infrastructure becomes more important as we recognize that the natural world is inextricably linked to the human society to form an extremely complex ecosystem. WSN-based envi- ronmental monitoring systems promise to enable domain scientists to work with data sets of unprecedented fine spatial and temporal resolution. In this paper, we present a novel environmental monitoring cyber infrastruc- ture that features (1) soil moisture monitoring with flexible spatial coverage and resolution, (2) seamlessly integrated wired and wireless sensors, (3) long-term autonomous remote near-real-time monitoring, (4) publicly available web ser- vices for sensor data visualization and dissemination, and (5) remote system monitoring and maintenance. Despite significant advances in recent years, there are still many challenging issues to be addressed to fulfill the full potential of the emerging WSN technology. The importance of empirical study of WSN has been widely recognized by the research community and considerable efforts have been put into the development and deployment of WSN testbed for various practi- cal applications, including environmental monitoring [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. However, there are many limitations in the existing WSN testbed deployments. For ex- ample, many deployments are in controlled environments, instead of real-life Y. Li et al. (Eds.): WASA 2008, LNCS 5258, pp. 224–236, 2008. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008