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Wireless sensor network using Xbee on Arduino Platform: An experimental

study

Conference Paper · August 2016

DOI: 10.1109/ICCUBEA.2016.7860081

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 Wireless Sensor Network using Xbee on Arduino
Platform
An experimental study

Prof. Hema Kumbhar

Department of Computer Engineering
Padmabhooshan Vasantdada Patil Institute of Technology,
Pune,India
kumbhar.hema344@gmail.com

Abstract—Wireless networks consists of nodes location. Temperature information of each sensor is forwarded
communicate with each other wirelessly.A wireless sensor to router. Router is connected to coordinator radio, where all
network (WSN) is a special class of ad-hoc networks that the data can be gathered. The sensor nodes are based on
integrates sensing, processing and communications in Arduino Platform. Arduino is an open-source electronics
small, battery-powered motes. These sensor nodes typically prototyping platform with flexible and easy-to-use hardware
collaborate on a global sensing task and deliver required and software[4].
data to one or more hubs . This paper presents The remaining of this paper is organized as follows,
experimental setup up of creating wireless sensor network In section II we well describe system design. Section III , will
using Arduino and Xbee module.This study will serve as a explain about Hardware Specifications . Followed by Software
model for almost all sensor network that one would like to used . Section V will describe preparing how basic
build. This is to create setup which will allow to read configurations.
temperature value form inexpensive temperature sensor
placed apart at various location that are mesh networked to II. NETWORK DESIGN
gather a stream of input and send to base station For this experimental study , we propose network of
which is based on the Arduino development platform with
Keywords—WSN, Arduino, Xbee Module, Temperature Sensor mesh topology. A setup of proposed network is shown in
Figure 1. We will be considering this as a static network.
I. INTRODUCTION Sensor Node 1 and sensor Node 2 will sense the temperature
WSN is fast advancing technology, which is opening value and send this information to coordinator radio.
number of opportunities in the field of remote sensing and data Coordinator node is very important and powerful node of
monitoring [1]. Wireless sensor network consists of number of network like sink node, which gather all data that is
small sensor remotely located forming a multi-hop network by transmitted. Routers are intermediate device, which
radio communication. Each network consists of sensor node relay/forward packets. Sensor node are simply end devise
base station and sink node. Base station collects data from which sleep often to save energy.
sensor nodes and forward to sink node. WSN widely used in
many applications because of its property of small and
inexpensive sensor node such as environment monitoring such
as forest fire detection, intelligent building systems, military
application, health care application and many more [1] [2].
Recent advances in the field of electronics and
communication leads to development of tiny battery enabled
sensor nodes. These sensor nodes are randomly deployed as a
wireless sensor network for sensing environment. Over the
years, the most important problem in wireless sensor network
is to develop a routing protocol that maximize the life time of
network. Each node in a sensor network becomes useless after
wasting its energy completely because its power totally
depends on the embedded battery [3].
In our practical setup we will be having router
coordinator and two sensor node . Sensor nodes with Fig. 1. System Design
temperature sensor are deployed at spatially distributed
 III. HARDWARE SPECIFICATION
The demonstration will require minimum basic components as
Arduino Uno Board, Xbee Module, Xbee USB
Board,temperature sensor LM 35.
A. Arduino Uno Board
Arduino is an open source micro-controller system based
on simple input output board. Arduino is typically used for
creating prototype as well as to develop standalone interactive
objects [5] Arduino was developed with requirements as easy
to learn and use, flexible, reliable.They are widely used in a
wireless sensor network as a portable device [6]. Arduino
comes in different variations like Arduino Uno, Arduino R1,
Arduino R2 ,The Arduino Duemilanove [5] etc. Fig. 2
shows the Arduino Uno .
Fig. 2. Arduino Uno Board
There are number of sensors and actuators that work
with Arduino. Popular sensors like temperature, air pollution,
light, GPS modules and sound and actuators like LEDs,
speakers and digital/analog outputs are common actuators
B. XBee Radio
In WSN every node is wirelessly communicate with each
other. Xbee is basically used for this purpose. Many people do
believe that ZigBee and Xbee are same. But that is not true.
XBee is a Zigbee compliant hardware [5].
ZigBee is a standard communications protocol for
low-power, low-throughput, low cost wireless mesh
networking applications ,which is built on top of IEEE
802.15.4.[8]. XBee is a brand of radio that supports a variety
of communication protocols, including Zig-Bee,802.15.4, and
WiFi.There are two basic varieties of XBee radio physical
hardware [5].
1. XBee Series 1 hardware
These radios use a microchip made by Free scale to provide
simple, standards-based point-to-point communications, as
well as a proprietary implementation of mesh networking
Fig. 3. Xbee Series 1
2. XBee Series 2 hardware
The Series 2 uses a microchip from Ember Networks that
enables several different flavors of standards based ZigBee
mesh networking
Fig. 4. Xbee Series 2
Both the Series 1 and Series 2 radios are available in two
different transmission powers,regular and The regular version
is called simply an XBee. TheXBee- PRO radio has more
power and is larger and more expensive.
C. Breadboards
Solder less breadboards provide an easy test bed for
hooking up electronic circuits without worrying about
electrical hazards. They consist of a plastic housing riddled
with small holes. Metal clips that lurk beneath the holes in the
breadboard provide a way to hold and connect components.
Each metal clip is called a bus, and everything attached to the
same bus is connected together electrically [6].
D. Xbee USB Explorer Board
All XBee radios have 20 connection pins, each spaced 2
mm apart. As the pins on the XBee are separated differently
than the holes in the breadboard. This tight spacing of the pins
helps to keep the radios very small, but doesn’t allow them to
fit into a breadboard[6].
An Explorer Board shown in Fig. 5 is used connect Xbees
to breadboard and then to computer’s USB port. The Xbee
connected to Explorer board is shown in Fig. No 6. Make note
of this, when Xbee radio connected to Explorer board the pin
functions changes [6].
 read the analog sensors connected. An the official way to
change or upgrade this firmware is through a program called
X-CTU and can be downloaded for free from the Digi website
[9].The X-CTU program is the official configuration program
for XBee radios which runs only on windows. X-CTU initially
used to load the proper firmware onto your XBee radio.
Screen shot of X-CTU is shown in Fig. 7.
Other terminal programs are also available like
CoolTerm. hyperterminal, TeraTerm, ZTerm.

1. Arduino IDE
Fig. 5. Xbee Explorer Board The Arduino is programmed using an open source
application that runs on computer called as IDE and freely
downloaded from the Arduino website’s software area [7].The
Arduino language is based on C/C++ . This IDE simply
translate script into C language and compile it using avr-gcc,
which makes it understandable to the micro-controller [6].
Refer Fig. No 8.

Fig. 6. Explorer Board with Xbee Radio

IV. SOFTWARE SPECIFICATION

A. Terminal Software to configure Xbees
Each XBee radio has a microcontroller running a
configurable program called as firmware.The firmware for the
XBee must be downloaded manually [9]. This firmware
performs necessary information for addressing,
communication, security and utility functions [6].

Fig. 8. Arduino IDE

V. PREPARING BASIC CONFIGURATION

This section will give how we can configure Xbee and
Arduino using X-CTU and IDE respectively [6].

A. Configuring Xbee for basic communication

We are using Xbee series 2 radio for this study. Each
Xbee has 64 bit address printed on back side of radio. The
beginning part of address is assigned by Digi (0013A200) and
lower part is actually address of radio
1. Plug Xbee series 2 radio on Xbee Explorer
board,then plug into one of your USB port of
. computer.
2. Launch X-CTU, switch to modem configuration tab,
Fig. 7. Screen shot of X-CTU
it will populate window which will show all kinds of
This firmware is configurable to change different settings
useful information
like: local address, security setting, destination address and
 3. 3 Xbee should be automatically detected and model COM port. Next, select the model of your Arduino board from
type should be listed needs to be XB24-ZB. If not the Board menu. Once selected com port, you’re ready to do
download latest configuration from website [9]. Click some programming [6].
download new version , use file options to install This simple code will turn on an LED light placed on Arduino
each of files you have downloaded. Then click read Board itself, wait a moment, then turn it off and wait a
button. Now X-CTU should recognize your Xbee. moment looks like this.
4. Under function set ,list of different firmware that can int ledPin = 13;
be loaded for this class of radio is shown. You can void setup()
select ZigBee Coordinator AT, ZigBee Router AT {
,etc depending on function of modem in network. A pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);
sample screen shots is shown in Fig. 9. }
5. Communication setting is given in Table 1 void loop()
6. There are other important parameters need to be {
changed like PANID, destination address high, digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);
destination address low. delay(1000);
7. Click Write button to program the radio button. digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);
8. You can even check radio addresses using AT delay(1000);
commands. }

C. Configuring Arduino with Xbee

The breadboard and explore board are easy way to
connect Arduino to xbee. explorer board is required, because
,directly radio can’t be connected to Arduino as pins in xbee
are spaced differently as discussed in section 3.4. Only four
pins are required for communication shown in 2 Mount Xbee
radio on explorer board and explorer board to Arduino . Keep
in mind that pin function of radio changes an shown in
following Fig 10..
Connect the cables as shown in Table 2. X-CTU con
figuration is shown in Table 1.Layout is shown in 11

Fig. 9. Screen shots of X-CTU with Xbee

TABLE 1: Default X-CTU Communication setting

Parameter Value
Baud 9600 Data 8 bits
Parity None Stop Bits 1
Flow Control None
Baud 9600 Data 8 bits
Parity None Stop Bits 1 Fig. 10. Pin function of Explorer board

B. Configuring Arduino
To connect to your Arduino board, you must plug it into your
computer using a USB A-to-B-style cable. Launch IDE ,select
 Routing Protocol for WSN with Energy Efficiency ”, International
TABLE 2 : Pin Connection for connecting Arduino Journal of Machine Learning and Computing , Vol.4 No.5, October
and Xbee 2014.

Xbee Arduino [4] Luis Ostiz Urdiain, Carlos Pita Romero, Jeroen Doggen, Tim
VCC or 3.3 V 3.3 V Dams, Patrick Van Houtven, ”Wireless Sensor Network Protocol for
Smart Parking Application Experimental Study on the Arduino
TX or DOUT RX or 0 Platform”, AMBIENT 2012 : The Second International Conference
RX or DIN TX or 1 on Ambient Computing, Applications, Services and Technologies
,pp 45-48
GND GND
[5] Banzi, M. ,Getting Started with arduino, Make Books,2008.

[6] R. Faludi, ”Building Wireless Sensor Networks: with Zig-Bee,

XBee, Arduino, and Processing”,O’Reilly Media, Incorporated, 2010

[7] Arduino homepage,http://www.arduino.cc, October

2012.
[8] P. Baronti, P. Pillai, V.W.C. Chook, S. Chessa, A. Gotta,and Y.F.
Hu.,”Wireless sensor networks: A survey on the state of the art and
the 802.15. 4 and ZigBee standards” Computer communications
,Volume 30, Issue 7, PP 1655–1695

[9] http://www.digi.com/products/xbee-rf-solutions/xctusoftware.

[10] Luis Sanabria, Jaume Barcelo, ”A course on Wireless Sensor

Networks (WSNs)”, April 2, 2014

Fig. 11. Layout of Connection between Arduino

and Xbee
Once connected, the Arduino uses serial commands to send
information out via the XBee, and to read in any information
that’s received.

VI. CONCLUSION
Wireless sensor network is a communication network
wherein sensor nodes deployed at various location senses the
data and send to base station . This paper proposed a practical
implementation of creating WSN using Mesh Topology with
Coordinator Node, Router and End Devices using Arduino
development boards, Xbee Module and Temperature sensors.
Xbee connectd to Arduino board are able to sense
data and wirelessly send the data to coordinator radio. Using
X-CTU and Arduino IDE we are able to synchronize Xbee
and Arduino.
REFERENCES
[1] I.F. Akyildiz, W. Su, Y. Sankarasubramaniam, E.
Cayirci,”Wireless sensor networks: a survey”, Computer Networks
38 (2002),pp 393–422

[2] A Roy and N Sarma, ”Energy Saving in MAC Layer of Wireless

Sensor Networks: a Survey ”, National Workshop in Design and
Analysis of Algorithm (NWDAA)”, Tezpur University, India, 2010”.

[3] L. Malathi and R. K. Gnanamurthy, ”Cluster Based Hierarchical

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