From Data Loggers to the Cloud: Building the ESDN, an Open-Source IoT Infrastructure for Environmental Sensing in Eastern North Carolina

Abstract

Environmental research increasingly demands continuous, high-resolution data, yet much of field monitoring still relies on standalone loggers that are read manually and fail silently. While commercial telemetry closes this gap, it introduces expensive cellular subscriptions, proprietary data models, and vendor lock-in. As monitoring efforts scale, these barriers compromise data ownership, limit automated quality control, and make long-term deployments financially unsustainable. This talk explores the Environmental Sensing and Data Network (ESDN), an open-architecture alternative built at the ECU Water Resources Center to solve these challenges. Since mid-2024, the ESDN has scaled to 110 nodes, 14 LoRaWAN gateways, and 162 sensors across eastern North Carolina. Assembled entirely from off-the-shelf components, it streams over 34 million records into a self-hosted ThingsBoard backend with a 95% packet delivery ratio, ensuring complete control over data quality from the field to the cloud. We will break down each component of the ESDN's four-layer sensing stack, from the physical field sensors and LoRaWAN wireless transport to the cloud infrastructure and user-facing dashboards. We will explain exactly how each layer operates, why it succeeds where traditional loggers fail, and the financial advantages of scaling an open network. Ultimately, this talk serves as a practical blueprint, demonstrating why research groups should adopt these accessible technologies to build their own automated, end-to-end data pipelines. No electrical engineering degree required.

About the speaker

Dr. Boris Dessimond is a Postdoctoral Scholar at East Carolina University's Water Resources Center specializing in environmental sensing and data analytics. He bridges embedded electronics with cloud infrastructure to build affordable environmental monitoring systems. Previously an R&D IoT Referent at BOBST and a researcher on the Canarin personal air-quality project, he holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science, Telecommunications, and Electronics from Sorbonne University.