Research of Wireless Sensor Networks for Intra- Spacecraft Environmental Monitoring

Wireless interface service is now one of the most interesting and newest avionics technologies. The wireless technology will be used widely in space exploration in the future. Considering the characters of the intra-spacecraft environmental monitoring, a system scheme based on wireless sensor networks is designed, in order to decrease the power consumption as well as the spacecraft mass and volume. A low power RF chip and the ZigBee protocol stack Z-Stack of TI are used to design a demonstrator. The network structure and the sensor node architecture, including its hardware and software design, are described. The demonstrator can monitor the environmental parameters of the intra-spacecraft and its instruments, e.g., temperature, humidity, the instruments' voltage and current. Experiments have been carried out. The results indicate that the sensor nodes' power consumption is extremely low, the mesh network architecture is robust and flexible, and the use of ZigBee Pro for WSN can achieve stable transmission of data between multiple terminals.