2012 Fourth International Conference on Computational Intelligence, Communication Systems and Networks

Angular Variation Methodology for Landslide

Measurement
Kiran Y. B, J D. Mallapur, Sharanappa P. H, Somu P. P
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering
Basaveshwar Engineering College, Bagalkot-587102, INDIA
Email:kiranbendigeri@gmail.com, bdmallapur@yahoo.co.in, phsharanu@gmail.com, somupp parande@yahoo.com

base station. Validity of node is completely dependent on

how effectively it uses power, as thousands of nodes are
deployed in a network, frequent replacement of a battery
is infeasible, useful power is mainly due to
transmitting or receiving data, processing a query
request and then forwarding the data to neighbor
nodes.
Advantage of using a sensor network is that,
sensors can be positioned far away from the actual
phenomena; the nodes are placed either inside the
phenomena or very close to it. Nodes within a network
may self-organize into clusters to complete a task given
by the user, due to which WSN can be used in variety
of applications. The applications includes like military
monitoring the friendly forces and ammunition with
battle field surveillance. Environmental applications
include tracing of moment of animals and
detection of fires in forests. The other applications
with sensors are like health, home, space exploration,
chemical processing etc. A typical wireless sensor
network scenario shown in figure 1, consist of sensor
nodes and a base station. For example if a need for
monitoring a temperature of a particular object is
required, a temperature sensitivity sensor is developed
using photo-resistors. The measurement of natural
disasters can be developed using a seismic sensors,
further a sensor can be designed for monitoring of
chemical plant or bio-gas detection, in all the cases a
low cost tiny sensors can be placed in each region.
Choosing one node as the cluster head, each cluster
collects the information from all the nodes within a
cluster in timely manner. Aggregated result can then be
sent to base station for further actions.
Further Section III describes about landslide
detection using sensor network. A related work on this
topic is given in section IV. Further section V gives the
proposed work with section VI showing some of the
simulated results. Section VII gives the conclusion.

Abstract Landslide detection is very common due to

uninten- tional natural disasters. A challenging wireless
sensor networks can be used to alarm the effects of
landslides well in advance before the cause occurs. The
proposed work considers a tiny sensor nodes for the
application with base station as central manager and sensor
nodes for gathering the raw data that are timely coordinated to monitor the applications. The applications
under considerations are hills, mountains, regions with heavy
rain fall where human monitoring is difficult rather
impossible. The sensor nodes deployed on the surfaces of
non reachable areas will be sending continuous measured
parameters such as voltage accelerometers along X and Y
axis and sensitivity accelerometers. Based on these
parameters tilt angle of a node is computed, which is
compared with threshold tilt angles. If the tilt angle is
lesser than threshold value, then land sliding alarm is sent to
the base station. In turn base station announces the same in
the loud speaker up-to 2 km-ts. The proposed scheme
results have been simulated using crossbow kit, moteview
software and visual basic coding to visualise its effects in
real time scenario.
Keywords - WSN; Landslides; Tilt angle;

I. IN T RO D U CT I O N
Wireless sensors are attracting due to its dynamic
characteristics for variety of applications. As there is
rapid advances of technology in Micro-ElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS), Integrated Circuit (IC),
and Radio Frequency (RF), the Wireless Sensor
Networks (WSN) have been widely spread out in a
variety of surveillance applications. A typical sensor
network is a group of sensor nodes with a base
station all connected in wireless for communication, and
consists of three units a microprocessor, a sensor unit
and a power control unit. Microprocessor provides
intelligence support to sensor nodes which is responsible
for control of sensors, execution of communication
protocols and signal processing algorithms on the
gathered sensor data. A sensor unit consists of large
number
of
nodes.
Individually, each node is
autonomous and has a short range; collectively, they are
cooperative and effective over a large area. Function of
each node is to collect the raw information while
running in a particular application and convey it to the

978-0-7695-4821-0/12 $26.00 2012 IEEE

DOI 10.1109/CICSyN.2012.19

II. LA N D S L I D E DE T E CT I O N US I N G WSN
Landslide causes a significant damage to society
and are common, it can be considered as serious threats
as its affects causes losses that occur to greater extent

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wireless sensor network used for land sliding detection is

shown in figure 2, here sensors are placed in remote
areas which are declared as a dangerous due to natural
disasters and located at a far distance, it is infeasible for a
person to always reach such areas. Sensors with
application of light sensing and angular change detection
are placed in each area to monitor the sliding, further
conveying the result to the base station. The placing
of sensor is such that its angular shift is always 90
degrees with respect to both the axis(X and Y axis), any
change in angular shift is declared as a landslide.

causing deaths of thousands of people. An early warning

system for landslide prediction can reduce these
losses to a good extent. A landslide can be
considered with respect to natural resources, for example
mountains, lands, rivers, floods, earth quakes where the
applicant changes its behavior causing disasters to the
society. Various methods have been proposed to
determine the risk of landslides. For all these application
one common technique of monitoring can be used to
control the conditions of each region. The monitoring
technique consist of application based sensors and its
central
computational unit.
Sensor
nodes
are
developed with sensing application such as detection of
changes in slope moment of a mountain or tilt angle
change of the node.

Advantage of using sensor [2] network for land

sliding
A sensor network can collect the monitored data,
aggre- gate it and send it to base station in timely manner,
which helps to know the running conditions of the
considered object.
A tiny sensors of large numbers and non hazardous
can be placed near the object, any damage to sensor
network may not affect the overall result.
Sensor network without any infrastructure can be constructed quickly; this calls for emergency setting up of a
network near a dangerous object.
Monitoring objects which are far from the peoples
reach- ability, energy efficient routing algorithms can be
used for running the network for months together without
human intervention thus making it cost effective.
Design ratio and application does really make it
demand- ing, a low cost sensors placed on object and its
prevention can save thousands of peoples life.

Fig. 1. Wireless Sensor Network Scenario

III. RE L AT E D WORK S
The paper[3] proposes the application of WSN in
detection and measurement of vibrations caused by
landslides by vibration sensor (accelerometer) using
Micaz devices. The results of this study indicate that
changes in accelerometer values ranging from 0.2 g
(gravity) to 0.49 g of either the X or Y of
accelerometer indicate that soil begins to move but not
significantly. Value of 0.5 g on X and Y accelerometer
show significant changes in ground movement and value
of 1 g and above of ground motion could lead to
disaster.
The work presented in paper [1] describes the
evolution of a wireless sensor network system for
landslide detection in region known for its heavy
rainfall and steep slopes. The deployment and data
retrieval
from
geophysical
sensors, and the
development of data collection and data aggregation
algorithms needed for the network are developed. The
work considers two layers, the lower layer wireless
sensor nodes are attached to the sensor columns, which
will sample and collect the heterogeneous data from the
sensor column, then the data packets are transmitted

Fig. 2. Lanslide detection using sensor kit

Landslide is described [1] as change in down slope

movement of soil, rock and organic materials under the
influence of gravity. Any change such as weathering,
wind action, human activity such as road building, heavy
rainfall, sharp fluctuations in ground-water levels,
vibrations caused by earthquakes, loading on upper
slopes; sliding can be triggered by gradual processes.
Once a landslide is triggered, various changes occur in
the object like sliding, flowing and falling. Typical

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such areas wireless sensor networks can be considered,

typical low cost sensors will fit for such applications.
Monitoring can be considered as an important issue, to
prevent from the harm caused to the society. The
proposed scheme for land sliding detection shown in
figure 3 is formed by considering a remote areas like
hills, that are often unreachable, where setting up an
infrastructure less network by a base stations are
done and sensor nodes are deployed randomly on the
monitoring object. Sensor nodes with certain position on
object which is accurately defined with X-axis and Yaxis are on continues monitoring of the object. The
monitored data is conveyed to the base station. The
newly proposed system provides the way to detect the
landslide in real time using the sensor kit, thus
providing a way to detect the landslide using a low cost
sensors.
The demonstration of landslides can be done
using crossbow kit in a real time, which consists of a
base station and a set of three sensor nodes, the
function of base station is to measure the parameters of
objects like temperature, energy, accelerometers. These
sensed parameters are sent to base station. In order to
visualise these parameters in real time from base station
and sensor nodes, a moteview software is considered that
reads the parameters of base station and displays it on its
data tab. After the simulation set up, various parameters
like voltage, temperature, acceleration, light, magnitude
are all displayed in moteview software. Since we are
interested in calculating the tilt angle measured by the
node, accelerometer readings can be used to calculate the
tilt angle at each instant of time. Based on the tilt angle of
node prediction of landslide can be said.
The coverage range of each sensor node using a
crossbow kit is considered to be 300m, coverage can be
increased by placing the nodes in series monitoring
such that every node act as base station to intermediate
node, collect and send the data to other neighbor node till
it reaches the original base station.
As the procedure starts by synchronization of all
sensor nodes with base station, considering the initial tilt
angle of sensor nodes to be 90 degrees along X-Y axis,
land sliding can be detected by angular change of each
sensor node with respect to X and Y axis. The affecting
area being monitored with sensor, considering the
different conditions for angular change like when the
angular change is 85 degrees just as read by the
base station, we can predict that there may be chances
of land sliding but it is not always the case since the
change in accelerometer may be due irregularities of
the considered object and the sensor is taking ups
and down moment while moving. As angular change
goes to 80 degrees people can be alarmed to vacant from
their areas for safety reasons. When the angular change is
60 degrees there can be definite of land sliding, all the
necessary preventive measures can be taken. The

to the upper layer. The upper layer consists of cluster

heads, which will aggregate the data and forwards it to
the sink node (gateway) kept at the deployment site.
Data is successfully received from the deployment site
with minimal data packet loss and analysis of data has
been performed.
In this scheme [4] CAMP routing protocol is been
used, every node acts as a beacon, only one node
broadcasts a beacon pulse. Nodes in its range will
receive this beacon and in turn send the
acknowledgment, followed by a clustering
algorithm with node selected as cluster head based on
energy of node. Data will be routed to the base station
optimally satisfying the trade-off between number of hops
and energy consumed per transmission. The clustering
process is triggered periodically so that new heads are
selected. The simulation results shows that number of
nodes alive in CAMP, exceeds that in LEACH, HBVR
and have better life time than power constrained LEACH.
This paper [5] presents an autonomous landslide
monitoring system based on wireless sensor networks.
Software agents are continuously collecting and
analyzing sensor data, such as recorded ground
acceleration and the orientations of the sensor nodes
along the slope. If movements are observed, the
collected data sets are automatically transmitted to a
connected server system for further diagnoses.
Paper [6] presents landslide detection using WSN
for real time monitoring system. The scheme has been
experimented using wireless sensor networking with the
integration of different sensors to detect the landslide. In
paper [7] network of sensor columns deployed at hills
with landslide potential with the purpose of detecting
the early signals preceding a catastrophic event is
detected. This information along with collected soil
measurements
(e.g.
soil
pore
pressure) are
subsequently passed to a Finite element model that
predicts whether and when a landslide will occur. Paper
[8] briefs about the landslides, how it occurs, the affect
after landslide and the risk of evaluation, while paper
[9],[10] describes about the crossbow kit and
moteview softwares, the way sensors are designed with
application of light and temperature sensing are given
here, using this kit various type of sensors can be
developed with the application like, wireless low-power
instrumentation,
weather
measurement
systems,
agriculture and irrigation control, habitat monitoring, soil
analysis, remote process control. Moteview provides the
tools to simplify deployment and monitoring, supports
all of Crossbows sensor and data acquisition boards.
IV.

PRO P O S E D WO RK

The proposed work considers issue of land sliding in a

region with disasters or heavy rain fall. To monitor

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The experiment is carried in the laboratory, initially

setting up the connection of all the devices as shown in
figure 4, as soon as the simulation begins, sensor nodes
are considered to be static, a continuous accelerometer
data is sent from each sensor node to base station,
moteview reads the parameters and displays it on the
screen, as the nodes are made moving physically. The
slide of the nodes are measured using the voltage and
sensitivity parameters. The lower the tilt angle more the
slide. We have set a threshold tilt angle, below which
a node is declared as a slide.
The graph drawn in figure 5 indicates the variation of
accelerometer along X-axis with respect to each node.
Each node exhibits different accelerometer along the Xaxis, this is because of their position on the lands.

change in phase is detected by the accelerometer

reading that is given by each node to base station. The
rate change of tilt angle is detected by using the below
equation.
= sin

V out V of f set

(1)

where
: Tilt angle
Vout : Voltage output accelerometer
Voffset : Offset voltage power supply (0.4 V)
S : Sensitivity accelerometer

Fig. 3. Wireless Ad-hoc Network Scenario

V. SI M U L AT I O N A N D RE S U LT S

Fig. 4. Set up of Crossbow Kit

In this experiment a crossbow kit hardware is

considered consisting of base station and a sensor nodes.
In order to work the device as sensor nodes, initially all
the nodes are configured using the moteview software.
This software helps to know the parameters read by the
sensor nodes, A visual basics coding is done in order to
run the simulation model developed, which is patched
with moteview software. Figure 4 shows the interfacing of
crosssbow sensor nodes and base station with the
processor done in the laboratory. After the set up, sensor
nodes senses the angle variation of the object, and is
transmitted to base station through air interface, further in
order to visualise the data, base station is connected to the
processor with wire, the data tab of moteview displays the
latest sensor readings received for each node in the
network. The columns include node ID, server time-stamp
and sensor values from the sensor board firmware packet.
The sensor data is automatically converted into standard
engineering units. Moteview is enabled to receive the data
from base station.

Fig. 5.

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Change of Accelerometer along X- axis

The result shown in figure 6 is measurement of

accelerometer along the Y-axis. Even in Y-axis
each node exhibits different variations. These variations
are truly because of their positions.
The graph drawn in figure 7 is about each
computational value of angular variation. These variations
are compared with the threshold value, if they are lesser
than the threshold, then landslide alarm is called. The data
below the circle indicates alarm data values.
VI. CO N CL U S I O N S A N D FU T U RE WO RK S
The proposed work considers a landslide detection
using a sensor nodes designed from a crossbow kit
consisting of sensors and a base station which senses the
real time data so as to be flexible with monitoring
application. Such method can be considered as
emerging technology, as with a group of low cost
sensors, a large areas can be monitored for their
favourable conditions. The work is carried out using
an experiment done in the laboratory placing with 3
sensor nodes and a base station all connected without
wire, and base station be connected to processor. As
the
simulation begin sensor reads accelerometer
reading, a slight change in accelerometer reading may
occur because of irregularities of the surface and
moment of sensors. Land sliding can be detected by
sudden slip of sensor nodes in certain elevations. Thus the
work provides the advantage of monitoring the remote,
risky, unreachable areas where human intervention is
uncommon.

Fig. 7.

Phase angle change of a node

This work can also be extended to various

application like monitoring heavy rain fall in places
like munar of kerala, and designing a sensor with
large power to monitor the large mountains in the areas
of himalayas. The range of communication can be
increased like cellular network, so that monitoring and
prevention can be done considering a large base
station and a server, where technicians working in
company can safeguard the considered object from far
distance.
About Authours
Kiran Y. B: (b. May.13, 1986) he is full time lecturer at
the institute given in affiliation. His area of interests are
wireless sensor networks, mobile network etc. he has (co) authored more than 4 papers.
J D. Mallapur: (b. Sept. 12, 1969) received
PhD in Electronics and Communication (2009) from
Visvesvaraya Technological University. She is full time
professor at the institute given in affiliation. Her current
research interests include wireless networks and fuzzy
applications. She has (co-) authored more than 32
papers.
Sharanappa P. H: (b. July.22, 1983) he is full time
lecturer at the institute given in affiliation. His area of
interests are Wireless communication, Digital electronics,
etc. he has (co-) authored more than 2 papers.
Somu P. P: (b. Mar.25, 1978) he is full time
lecturer at the institute given in affiliation. His area of
interests are multimedia networks, wireless sensor
networks etc. he has (co-) authored more than 3 papers.

Fig. 6.

Change of Accelerometer along Y- axis

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RE F E RE N CE S
[1]

Maneesha V. Ramesh, Sangeeth Kumar, and P. Venkat Ranga,

Wireless Sensor Network for Landslide Detection,Project of
WINSOC and INFSO DG, 2008
[2] Alberto Rosi, Nicola Bicocchi, Gabriella Castelli, Marco Mamei,
Franco Zambonelli, Landslide Monitoring with Sensor
Networks: Experiences and Lessons Learnt from a Real-World
Deployment, Int.
J.
Signal and Imaging
Systems
Engineering,2007
[3] Herry Z. Kotta, Kalvein Rantelobo, Silvester Tena, Gregorius
Klau, Wireless Sensor Network for Landslide Monitoring in
Nusa Tenggara Timur, Procedings of TELKOMNIKA, Vol.9,
No.1, April 2011, pp. 9 18
[4] Kalyana Tejaswi, Prakshep Mehta, Rajat Bansal, Chandresh
Parekh, S. N.Merchant and U. B. Desai, Routing Protocols for
Landslide Prediction using Wireless Sensor Networks
Proceedings of international journal of IEEE
[5] K. Georgieva1, K. Smarsly, M. Konig1 and K H. Law, An
Autonomous Landslide Monitoring System based on Wireless
Sensor Networks, Ger- man Research Foundation (DFG) and U.S.
National Science Foundation (NSF).
[6] P. K. Mishra, S. K. Shukla, S. Dutta, S. K. Chaulya and G. M.
Prasad , Detection of Landslide Using Wireless Sensor Networks
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[7] Andreas Terzis , Annalingam Anandarajah ,Kevin MooreI, Jeng
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IPSN06, April 19.21, 2006, Nashville, Tennessee, USA.
[8] C. Veder. Landslides and Their Stabilization, Springer-Verlag,
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[9] Crossbow Technology. X Mesh Users Manual
Revision C.
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[10] Crossbow Technology. MoteView Users Manual. Crossbow
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