Design and implementation of a man-overboard emergency discovery system based on wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Recently, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely employed in many different fields such as military, surveillance, health, agricultural, automation, and environmental monitoring. This paper presents a designed and implemented WSN-based man-overboard emergency discovery system, abbreviated as W-MEDS, that discovers the location of a person in emergency circumstances and runs an alarm system on a ship. The developed W-MEDS carries out a fast man-overboard (MOB) discovery and initiates the vital rescue procedure. It mainly consists of a WSN and a control and discovery system. When a MOB accident occurs, this situation is easily detected through the WSN nodes capable of real-time sensing (i.e. temperature, humidity, and acceleration) and the system enables location estimation. The control and discovery system analyzes and displays the received data from the WSN nodes. The most noteworthy advantage of the proposed W-MEDS is that it enables both real-time alarm monitoring and fast recovery. In addition to the implementation of the W-MEDS, considering hardness in performance evaluation of the real system, it has also been simulated in the OPNET Modeler to confirm the accuracy for different sizes and numbers of nodes.