OpenWeather: a peer-to-peer weather data transmission protocol

Abstract: The study of the weather is performed using instruments termed weather stations. These weather stations are distributed around the world, collecting the data from the different phenomena. Several weather organizations have been deploying thousands of these instruments, creating big networks to collect weather data. These instruments are collecting the weather data and delivering it for later processing in the collections points. Nevertheless, all the methodologies used to transmit the weather data are based in protocols non adapted for this purpose. Thus, the weather stations are limited by the data formats and protocols used in them, not taking advantage of the real-time data available on them. We research the weather instruments, their technology and their network capabilities, in order to provide a solution for the mentioned problem. OpenWeather is the protocol proposed to provide a more optimum and reliable way to transmit the weather data. We evaluate the environmental factors, such as location or bandwidth availability, in order to design a protocol adapted to the requirements established by the automatic weather stations. A peer to peer architecture is proposed, providing a functional implementation of OpenWeather protocol. The evaluation of the protocol is executed in a real scenario, providing the hints to adapt the protocol to a common automatic weather station.