Telemetry use cases: Environment sensing

Environment sensing uses telemetry to collect information about river water levels and quality, atmospheric pollutants, and other environmental data.

Sensors are frequently located in remote places, without access to wired communication. Wireless bandwidth is expensive and reliability can be low. Typically, a number of environment sensors in a small geographical area are connected to a local monitoring device in a safe location. The local connections might be wired or wireless.

Invisibility: The sensor devices are likely to be less accessible, lower powered, and deployed in greater numbers, than the central monitoring device. The sensors are sometimes "dumb", and the local monitoring device includes adapters to transform and store sensor data. The monitoring device is likely to incorporate a general-purpose computer that supports Java SE or ME. Invisibility is unlikely to be a major requirement when configuring the MQTT client.
Uneven connectivity: The capabilities of sensors, and cost and bandwidth of remote connection, typically results in a local monitoring hub connected to a central server.
Security: Unless the solution is being used in a military or defensive use case, security is not a major requirement.
Connectivity: Many uses do not require continuous monitoring or immediate availability of data. Exception data, such as a flood level alert, does need to be forwarded immediately. Sensor data is aggregated at the local monitor to reduce connection and communication costs, and then transferred using scheduled connections. Exception data is forwarded as soon as it is detected at the monitor.
Scalability: Sensors are concentrated around local hubs, and sensor data is aggregated into packets that are transmitted according to a schedule. Both these factors reduce the load on the central server that would be imposed by using directly connected sensors.