Indonesian Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Vol. 6, No. 1, April 2017, pp. 148 ~ 154 DOI: 10.11591/ijeecs.v6.i1.pp148-154  148 Received November 2, 2016; Revised January 25, 2017; Accepted February 15, 2017 Video Monitoring Application Using Wireless Sensor Node with Various External Antenna Amerrul Zabri* 1 , Mohamad Kamal A. Rahim 2 , Farid Zubir 3 , Norsaidah Muhamad Nadzir 4 , Huda A. Majid 5 1,2,3,4 Advanced RF and Microwave Research Group (ARFMRG), Communication Engineering Department, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310 UTM Johor Bahru, Johor. 5 Research Center for Applied Electromagnetics, Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia, Parit Raja, Batu Pahat, Johor, Malaysia *Corresponding author, e-mail: amerzab90@gmail.com Abstract Surveillance and monitoring has become very important for security reasons these days. The use of wireless sensor node device offers a variety of platform depends on the attached sensor. When an image sensor is attached, the wireless sensor node is capable of monitoring an area wirelessly. Since wireless environment uses antenna to transmit and receive data, antenna is an important component that affects the video monitoring performance. This paper describes a surveillance system using Raspberry Pi with various external antenna. The Raspberry Pi with Pi Camera module and various types of antennas was used for testing and experimentation in line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) condition. The results revealed that the Yagi Uda antenna gives the best output in terms of its signal strength and average Receive (Rx) rate. Keywords: wireless sensor node, raspberry Pi 3, line-of-sight & non-line-of-sight Copyright © 2017 Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Recently, there has been a rise in video surveillance system in public and private surroundings due to an increasing consciousness of security. Factories, hospitals, supermarkets, hotels, army base, schools, and companies are having their own monitoring and surveillance system to function 24/7. The popular traditional surveillance system, closed-circuit television (CCTV), provides real-time monitoring, surveillance footage, and giving authorities evidence against illegal actions [1]. It is enabled by high end cameras, video servers, network switch and monitoring computers. All these resources lead to complexity, high expense, high power consumption, and also requires more area to be properly established. To further reduce the cost, complexity, and power consumption, IP-based data delivery cameras are developed and mass produced. However, most of the IP cameras require high bandwidth, thus involving this as a major drawback. Performance of the IP cameras are assessed with respect to their video resolution, power dissipation, bitrates, distortion, frame rates, and network bandwidth [2]. Numerous projects and processes use Raspberry Pi as an IP- based camera wireless sensor node for surveillance and monitoring. It is the best to implement as a sensor node since its price, processing power; memory capacity, connectivity, and multipurpose usage overpower other types of sensor node [3]. Raspberry Pi is a credit sized card, low cost single board computer. It contains many features that are embedded to a single board such as GPIO pins for interfacing sensors and switches, Ethernet port, USB ports, HDMI port to interface with monitor, camera port and an audio jack. A micro SD card is used as the hard disk for the operating system. For the purpose of surveillance system, Raspberry Pi operates as the brain that perfoms the complete control of the system. A Pi camera module is mounted together on the boards CSI connector where the camera features a HD display of image [4]. Raspberry Pi has the capability to stream videos, similar to the IP cameras where the video can be displayed on a web browser. A lot of papers on the development of video monitoring using Raspberry Pi mostly focus only on the system architecture using wireless adapter without taking the consideration of specification of the antenna used. Hence, the same