Ubiquitous Wireless Sensor Networks for Environmental Monitoring in the Western Himalayan Region of India

Ubiquitous Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSN) has emerged as a most powerful and efficient tool for monitoring, assessing and managing the environmental pollution related issues particularly in getting the real time data from widely spread locations, to a centralized location, which is not possible otherwise. Wireless Sensor Networks has also been widely used by military, security agencies, industries, healthcare monitoring systems and even for managing, to some extent, the manmade/ natural disasters. During the past few years, the state of Himachal Pradesh, located in the Western Himalayan region of India, has made remarkable progress in developing new industrial areas with growing population along traffic startups having a good network of transport infrastructure. Such a growth in new industrial establishments has opened up growing opportunities for the people living in this area, but at the same time a significant increase in the pollution level has also been noticed in the environmental air as well as in water posing a serious threat to the habitants. This conceptual paper presents a solution for monitoring air pollution to acquire real time values in the state of Himachal Pradesh, India. A successful implementation of Ubiquitous WSN and its connectivity with the Himachal State Wide Area Network (HIMSWAN) will help in analyzing air pollution parameters in a better way by collecting the real time data from the widely spread locations at a central location, analyzing it and then generating the forewarning for the people of the state.