2017 Devices for Integrated Circuit (DevIC), 23-24 March, 2017, Kalyani, India
Data Centre Temperature Monitoring with ESP8266
Based Wireless Sensor Network and Cloud Based
Dashboard with Real Time Alert System
Saraswati Saha
Dept. of Electronics and Communication Engineering,
RCC Institute of Information Technology
Kolkata, India
saraswati2202@gmail.com
Abstract— The Internet of Things (IoT) system proposed in this
paper is an advanced solution for monitoring the temperature at
different points of location in a data centre, making this
temperature data visible over internet through cloud based
dashboard and sending SMS and email alerts to predefined
recipients when temperature rises above the safe operating zone
and reaches certain high values. This helps the datacenter
management team to take immediate action to rectify this
temperature deviation. Also this can be monitored from
anywhere anytime over online dashboard by the senior level
professionals who are not present in the data centre at any point
in time. This Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) based monitoring
system consists of temperature sensors, ESP8266 and Wi-Fi
router. ESP8266 is a low power, highly integrated Wi-Fi solution
from Espressif. The ESP8266 here, in this prototype, connects to
‘Ubidots’ cloud through its API for posting temperature data to
the cloud dashboard on real time and the cloud event
management system generates alerts whenever the high
temperature alert event is fired. Cloud events need to be
configured for different alerts beforehand through the user
friendly user interface of the platform. It’s to be noted that the
sensor used here can be leveraged to monitor the relative
humidity of the data center environment as well along with the
temperature of the data center. But for this prototype solution
focus is kept entirely on the temperature monitoring.
Keywords—IoT; Internet of Things; WSN; Wireless Sensor
Network; Data Centre; Sensor; Cloud; ESP8266; Data Center;
Arduino IDE; cloud based event management system; DHT 11;
DHT 22; Real time dashboard; Environmental monitoring
I. INTRODUCTION
Data center environmental control is a constructive generic
framework for maintaining temperature, humidity, and other
physical qualities of air within a specific range in order to
allow the equipment housed in a data center to perform
optimally throughout its lifespan. Here an IoT approach has
been taken towards building such a framework. The term IoT is
broadly used to describe a framework where sensors are
connected to objects and help these objects to share their
‘digital voice’ with the external world over internet connection.
978-1-5090-4724-6/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
307
Anupam Majumdar
Former Head of State e-Governance Mission Team (SeMT),
Tripura
National Institute for Smart Government (NISG), India
anupam1211@gmail.com
Sensor based Temperature monitoring system is an important
part of the proposed framework for an optimal environmental
monitoring strategy. The sensors should be placed at multiple
points of individual racks to measure the heat being generated.
The sensors can also be put at the air conditioning system’s
vents, to measure efficiency. Much of the work performed so
far for monitoring the data center environment is based on
Arduino hardware platform for data processing which is again
networked with XBee RF modules to develop the wireless
sensor network.[1] It’s found to be an expensive solution even
with the basic XBee modules considered for the nodes. On top
of this as these modules need some additional board like
Arduino, for processing; the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of
this solution rises even more. The data rate (250 Kbps) is not at
all impressive as well. A different approach is also observed in
previously done works and studies deploying Arduino and
ESP8266. In this approach entire processing is done within
Arduino and as the WI-FI provider ESP8266 is used. Here the
cost has come down a lot compared to the first approach. But
the capabilities of ESP8266 are not well utilized; specifically
the processing power of ESP8266 is not at all used. Its usage is
kept limited for WI-FI purposes only. Now the solution being
proposed here uses ESP8266 which has processing capability
as well as integrated Wi-Fi on the chip itself. No additional
board like Arduino is used in the proposed approach. ESP8266
does the processing as well as the WI-FI activities but with
pretty low power consumption. Data fetched by the sensors are
sent to the ESP8266 which then can be analyzed and processed
by the ESP8266 on board microcontroller itself with the help of
the firmware loaded into its flash memory. Wi-Fi Router acts
as the Access Point of the Wireless Sensor Network or WSN.
On the chip Wi-Fi of ESP8266 connects to the Wi-Fi router as
a station node and can push the live sensor data to the Ubidots
cloud platform in the internet at regular intervals. That means
the ESP is playing as the sensor interface unit in one hand and
on the other hand is playing as the Wireless Communication
Unit besides doing all the processing. This results into faster
processing and transmission. This solution lowers the Total
Cost of Ownership (TCO) as well compared to the two
 2017 Devices for Integrated Circuit (DevIC), 23-24 March, 2017, Kalyani, India
approaches discussed earlier. Current trend of IoT focuses on
pushing data into a centralized cloud platform [2] which is
being administered by IT experts and available to anyone with
the proper credentials and an Internet connection. The power
of cloud computing is making the required storage and
processing power available to handle huge sensor data. The
overall uptime of these platforms continues to trend upwards
as they become more resilient to the increasing demand and
expectations of the IoT world. [3][4]
Being aligned with this trend, the proposed approach also
includes Cloud implementation on top of ESP8266 WSN based
temperature monitoring system. Here not only the dashboard
feature of the cloud solution is leveraged but also the ‘Alert /
Feedback system from cloud’ is implemented and tested.
II. SYSTEM OVERVIEW
A. System Components
DHT 11 sensors send the temperature data to the ESP8266.
For every single test location, 2 sensors are placed to validate
received sensor data as well as to provide device redundancy at
the sensor level. ESP8266 is loaded with the firmware program
written in C that does all the interfacing with sensors,
processing the sensor data and interfacing with cloud platform
and finally uploading the data to the cloud platform ideally
once every one minute. To write the code and upload it to the
ESP8266, Arduino IDE is used. Two sets of data from two
sensor units are compared for an unusual mismatch and if any
such mismatch is found that set of data is discarded and next
set of data are fetched. This processing is done by the
microcontroller along with supporting components on the
ESP8266 board. If data received from two sensors located at a
single spot are found somewhat matching, then that set of data
is pushed to the Ubidots cloud. Ubidots cloud platform needs
to be configured to accept this data from the sensors and show
the data over dashboards. This platform also has feature to
configure alert for different events. For this case, multilevel
alert SMSs are configured for specific phone numbers.
Similarly email notifications are configured to report alert at
multiple levels of temperature.
Figure 1: System Diagram
308
B. Hardware Implementation
The hardware components used in the proposed system
need some discussion.
Measurement range of DHT 11 is from 0 degree centigrade
to 50 degree centigrade with response time of 6 to 30 seconds.
Its small size, low power consumption and maximum 20 meter
signal transmission makes it the suitable for this application.
For wider temperature range and better precision DHT22
sensors are used.
ESP8266 is a system-on-a-chip (SoC) designed by Espressif
Systems which is based on 32-bit RISC CPU with the Tensilica
Xtensa LX106 processor. It has features like inbuilt Wi-Fi
(802.11 b/g/n), GPIO (General Purpose Input / Output), Inter-
Integrated Circuit (I²C), analog-to-digital conversion, Serial
Peripheral Interface (SPI), UART (Universal asynchronous
receiver/transmitter), and pulse-width modulation (PWM).
ESP8266 has a number of versions with varying capacities.
For this project its basic level version i.e. ESP8266-01 will
be sufficient enough with its 2 GPIO pins and integrated
TCP/IP protocol stack. [5] In this project ESP is used as a
station and it connects to the Access Point of the wireless
network i.e. the wireless router using the SSID (Service Set
Identifier) and the password of the network. As it connects to
the Access Point successfully it gets assigned to an IP.
Now to get the desired functionality out of the ESP, it needs
to be programmed. This is done here by connecting the ESP to
Arduino IDE (Integrated Development Environment) running
on a laptop through the UART interface (Transmit and Receive
pins) of ESP via UART to USB converter (figure 2). Compiled
binary version of the C program is uploaded to the flash
memory of the ESP.
Figure 2: Uploading of firmware to ESP8266
 2017 Devices for Integrated Circuit (DevIC), 23-24 March, 2017, Kalyani, India
C. Software Implementation
• Arduino IDE (Integrated Development
Environment) – This IDE can be used to program
ESP8266 as well.[7] The firmware is written in C
language including required header files to
integrate DHT sensors. Also the program includes
header file required to interact with the cloud
platform. This IDE helps to write and compile the
firmware and then upload to the flash memory of
the ESP8266. The library files required for the
prototype are extracted in the folder pointed as
library folder for the Arduino IDE. [8]
• Cloud Platform: The ESP8266 and sensors need to
be integrated first with the cloud platform.[9]
Ubidots cloud platform provides user friendly
interfaces to do this and assigns a token for every
device or sensor variable. Once configured this
cloud platform provides online real time
dashboards for the sensor temperatures. The same
platform also provides interface to define SMS
and email alerts on specific sensor values.
Figure 3: Cloud configuration for sensors
Figure 4: Cloud configuration for Alerts
309
III. FLOW STEPS
• Sense the temperature at a specific location of a
rack with the help of 2 sensors.
• ESP8266 receives the data from the sensors
through its GPIOs (General Purpose Input Output)
• If the values received from 2 sources are not
diverse beyond a certain limit, then the values are
considered to be posted, otherwise that set of data
are discarded by the ESP8266.
• ESP8266 connects to the Wi-Fi router using SSID
and password.
• ESP8266 also establishes connection to the cloud
platform using http protocol.
• ESP posts temperature data to the cloud platform
using the token assigned. [9]
• The cloud platform shows the live real time data
on the dashboard.
• This cloud platform shoots alert SMS and alert
emails as and when predefined alert situation
arises i.e. when temperature rises beyond alarm
settings.
Figure 5: Prototype Setup at lab with DHT 11 and ESP8266
IV. RESULTS
As the prototype system is deployed at a setup, the live data
is being monitored over the cloud dashboard. The cooling
system is adjusted a bit to raise the temperature beyond a set
limit for a while. The cloud alert system sends out SMS alert to
preconfigured cell phone as the temperature touches the alarm
setting value. It also sends out a mail to the defined email id.
The dashboard continuously presents the live data. As the
cooling system is made normal, the temperature gradually
corrects towards normal one. This is also depicted over the
 2017 Devices for Integrated Circuit (DevIC), 23-24 March, 2017, Kalyani, India 310

dashboard. Dashboard snippets for uprising and falling References

temperature are shown here.
[1] Michael G. Rodriguez, Luis E. Ortiz Uriarte, Yi Jia, Kazutomo Yoshii,
Robert Ross, Peter H. Beckman “Wireless Sensor Network for Data-
Center Environmental Monitoring,” published in 2011 Fifth
International Conference on Sensing Technology (ICST)
[2] Industrial Internet of Things and Communications at the Edge by Tony
Paine
[3] Designing the Internet of Things by Adrian McEwen and H. Cassimally
[4] The Internet of Things in the Cloud by H. Zhou
[5] http://espressif.com/ ESP8266 Details
[6] http://www.esp8266.com/ Information on ESP8266
[7] https://www.arduino.cc Arduino software download
[8] http://playground.arduino.cc/Main/DHT11Lib DHT library
[9] https://ubidots.com/ Ubidots Cloud Configuration
[10] http://download.arduino.org/products/UNOWIFI/0A-ESP8266-
Datasheet-EN-v4.3.pdf Datasheet for ESP8266

Figure 6: Temperature Rise as seen on dashboard

Figure 7: Temperature Fall towards Normal

V. CONCLUSIONS
A prototype wireless sensor network for data center
temperature monitoring is developed with the help of
ESP8266. A continuous test run of more than 24 hours shows
steady performance of ESP8266. This system not only adds up
value to the existing on site monitoring system available at data
centers but also provides lot of comfort to the higher authority
of Data Center management to monitor the parameters from
remote anytime with the help of the dashboard. The SMS and
email based alert system adds additional layer of tighter
monitoring of the vital parameters thereby assisting to take
immediate action if any alarming situation is reported.
ESP8266 with its very compact size, higher data rate, low
power operation and very low TCO makes the solution more
deployment ready for real life scenarios.