Smart Sensor Buoys - Scalable Solution for Continuous and Flexible Water Monitoring

Within this paper an industry-driven insight to an environmental development project will be given. The approach offers the novel possibility to interconnect commercially available sensors to economic and high-performance floating platforms. Each platform of the meshed environmental monitoring system acts as weather- and animal-resistant housing and as logic connection regarding self-sufficient energy and data communication. The buoys are uncommonly small in scale and emit a rather low level of electromagnetic emissions, to act widely unnoticeable once set up into the ecosystem. Furthermore, the buoys auto-negotiate among each other, store the acquired data and generated information autonomously internally and in a central database. Due to this, each user/operator may exchange the types of used sensors, the frequency of data acquisition or the operation mode of each participant of the wireless meshed network within regular operation.