The Design and Deployment of an End-To-End IoT Infrastructure for the Natural Environment

Nundloll, Vatsala and Porter, Barry and Blair, Gordon and Emmett, Bridget and Jones, Davey and Chadwick, Dave and Winterbourn, Ben and Beattie, Philip and Dean, Graham and Shaw, Rory and Shelley, Wayne and Brown, Mike and Ullah, Izhar (2019) The Design and Deployment of an End-To-End IoT Infrastructure for the Natural Environment. Future Internet, 11 (6). ISSN 1999-5903

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) systems have seen recent growth in popularity for city and home environments. We report on the design, deployment, and use of the IoT infrastructure for environmental monitoring and management. Working closely with hydrologists, soil scientists, and animal behaviour scientists, we successfully deployed and utilised a system to deliver integrated information across these two fields in the first such example of real-time multidimensional environmental science. We describe the design of this system; its requirements and operational effectiveness for hydrological, soil, and ethological scientists; and our experiences from building, maintaining, and using the deployment at a remote site in difficult conditions. Based on this experience, we discuss key future work for the IoT community when working in these kinds of environmental deployments.