Low-Power Wireless Sensor Framework for Continuous Environmental Monitoring in Cultural Heritage Repositories

Abstract

Conservation of cultural collections should be accompanied by constant monitoring of the environmental parameters in order to regulate the temperature, humidity, and concentration of particulates. This paper constructs a low power wireless sensor network (WSN) architecture to be used in long-term library, museum, and archive depository monitoring. The suggested system is a hybrid of the Zigbee and LoRa communication technologies to provide a reliable two-range connectivity between the rooms- Zigbee will be used to transmit data intra-room, and LoRa will be used to transmit data to the gateway. All sensor nodes will incorporate efficient energy consuming DHT22 and SDS011 sensors with an ATmega328P microcontroller and controlled by an adaptive duty-cycling algorithm that dynamically modulates the time between samples in response to changes in the environment. A pilot system was tested in one of the archives of a university and during the period of 18 months it worked independently and demonstrated a 98 percentage of data transmission rate and zero packet loss. The comparative analysis of the traditional Zigbee-only and LoRa-only systems had shown a 32 percent lower average power consumption and 24 percent reduced maintenance rate, with the level of latency to be negligible. The hybrid architecture is highly efficient in terms of energy, communication resilience, and scalability of the architecture, which makes it appropriate to large and geographically spread heritage environments. The study provides a scalable and sustainable IoT-based monitoring architecture that can operate autonomously on the long-term basis. The suggested framework promotes preventive conservation, making it easy to control the conditions with regular environmental monitoring and reducing energy and maintenance expenses, which can be used as a reasonable example of intelligent, low-power heritage management systems.