A wireless sensor network for security systems adopting the Bluetooth technology

Bluetooth is a new promising short-range wireless technology designed to enable wireless communications among different devices. It has been gaining increasing interest from various industries because of its inexpensive cost, low power and small size. Compared with other wireless technologies, Bluetooth uses short data packets and a higher hop rate. This combination makes the devices enough immune to interference with radio frequency sources as well as with other users. In this paper, a l ow power, portable, and secure Bluetooth sensor system has been designed adopting an FPGA and a Bluetooth module. The system have built in security, including authentication and encryption to prevent eavesdropping. At low sampling rates, the adopted solution offers low power consumption and consequently battery with lower capacity can be adopted, minimizing the sensor system weight. With higher sampling rates, the system equipped with a FPGA offers the best architectural solution and performance. Therefore, Bluetooth can be satisfactorily adopted in many different applications such as habitat monitoring, civil infrastructure health monitoring, biomedical vital signs monitoring, data collection.