Some factors requirement to be considered in designing individual node include capability of communication and

computation, robustness, power consumption, security, size, cost and some special requirements
products of Crossbow and consisted of the Micaz nodes equipped with multifunctional sensor boards. Later, we
developed the custom nodes according to the practical needs. The reasons that we must develop these custom nodes . The
most important reason iS that all the electrical apparatus for explosive gas atmospheres, or in other words
used in the coal mine environment, must satisfy the up-to-date People's Republic of China national
standard of GB3836-2000. The second reason is although the
ATMEL ATmega128L microcontroller of Micaz provides on-chip ADCs with 10 bits of
resolution; they aren't able to meet the need of our application. Finally in oder to improve the
reliability of wireless data transmission and get longer transmission range, an external power amplifier
circuitry must be built.


The custom node is based on the Moteiv "tmote sky" node and UC Berkeley "mote" sensor node. It is
consisted of "mote" board and various sensor boards. The mote board The mote board features a TI
16Bit RISC-core MSP430F1611 microcontroller, and a 2.4GHz Chipcon CC2420 IEEE 802.15.4 RF
transceiver. TI MSP430F1611 has many advantages over ATMEL ATmega128L: 16Bit RISC
architecture, 12Bit high-speed ADC, abundant on-chip resources and interfaces, ultra-low power
consumptionthe physical layer of 2.4GHz frequency can provide data rate up to 250kbps through O-
QPSK modulation technology which is beneficial to get
higher throughput, less communication delay and shorter period, consequently lower power consumption.

The application programs we developed are based oTinyOS platform and TinyDB database management
system(DBMS) TinyOS is an embedded operating system designed for resource-limited wireless sensor
networks.it features a component-based architecture and its abundant component libraries include
network protocols,distributedservices, sensor drivers, and data acquisition tools and so on, these libraries
can be used in developing a custom
application. The component-based architecture greatly simplifies the difficulty and reduces the
complexity software design and development. Lightweight thread technology and active message
communication technology used to applying in high-performance communication of
parallel computing can be used in wireless sensor network to improve the performance of network, reduce
power consumption and simplify application development. In order to improve system reliability and
robustness, we redesigned several components and interfaces, optimized network topology and routing
protocol and resource management.
We developed a triggered event detection model and a reliable data retrieval mechanism to meet the
demands including bandwidth and data quality. Besides, the program must live up to the safety and
reliability standards of coalmines industry.
A Data Processing, Query and Fusion
The gas detection data which iS acquired and calculated by the sensor network is stored inside the
sensor nodes until a request command occurs to transfer that data to the base station. Each node
stores the gas concentration information
in the flash memory of the mote board. When receiving a request, it will
corre'spo.nd a. nd .transmit that data to the base station or higher-lever
monitoring system. Data query, request, respond, aggregate and fuse
could processed by TinyDB. TinyDB is an in-network query processing
system based on TinyOS. The individual sensors