Wireless Sensor Network

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Wireless sensor network
A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a computer network consisting of spatially distributed autonomous devices using sensors to cooperatively monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure, motion or pollutants, at different locations. The development of wireless sensor networks was originally motivated by military applications such as battlefield surveillance. However, wireless sensor networks are now used in many civilian application areas, including environment and habitat monitoring, healthcare applications, home automation, and traffic control.
In addition to one or more sensors, each node in a sensor network is typically equipped with a radio transceiver or other wireless communications device, a small microcontroller, and an energy source, usually a battery. The size a single sensor node can vary from shoebox-sized nodes down to devices the size of grain of dust. The cost of sensor nodes is similarly variable, ranging from hundreds of dollars to a few cents, depending on the size of the sensor network and the complexity required of individual sensor nodes. Size and cost constraints on sensor nodes result in corresponding constraints on resources such as energy, memory, computational speed and bandwidth.
In computer science, wireless sensor networks are an active research area with numerous workshops and conferences arranged each year.

Applications
The applications for WSNs are many and varied. They are used in commercial and industrial applications to monitor data that would be difficult or expensive to monitor using wired sensors. They could be deployed in wilderness areas, where they would remain for many years (monitoring some environmental variable) without the need to recharge/replace their power supplies. They could form a perimeter about a property and monitor the progression of intruders (passing information from one node to the next). There are a many uses for WSNs.
Typical applications of WSNs include monitoring, tracking, and controlling. Some of the specific applications are habitat monitoring, object tracking, nuclear reactor controlling, fire detection, traffic monitoring, etc. In a typical application, a WSN is scattered in a region where it is meant to collect data through its sensor nodes.

  • ? Environmental monitoring
    ? Habitat monitoring
    ? Acoustic detection
    ? Seismic Detection
    ? Military surveillance
    ? Inventory tracking
    ? Medical monitoring
    ? Smart spaces
    ? Process Monitoring


Area monitoring
Area monitoring is a typical application of WSNs. In area monitoring, the WSN is deployed over a region where some phenomenon is to be monitored. As an example, a large quantity of sensor nodes could be deployed over a battlefield to detect enemy intrusion instead of using landmines. When the sensors detect the event being monitored (heat, pressure, sound, light, electro-magnetic field, vibration, etc), the event needs to be reported to one of the base stations, which can take appropriate action (e.g., send a message on the internet or to a satellite). Depending on the exact application, different objective functions will require different data-propagation strategies, depending on things such as need for real-time response, redundancy of the data (which can be tackled via data aggregation techniques), need for security, etc.

  • Characteristics
    Unique characteristics of a WSN are:
    ? Small-scale sensor nodes
    ? Limited power they can harvest or store
    ? Harsh environmental conditions
    ? Node failures
    ? Mobility of nodes
    ? Dynamic network topology
    ? Communication failures
    ? Heterogeneity of nodes
    ? Large scale of deployment
    ? Unattended operation


    Sensor nodes can be imagined as small computers, extremely basic in terms of their interfaces and their components. They usually consist of a processing unit with limited computational power and limited memory, sensors (including specific conditioning circuitry), a communication device (usually radio transceivers or alternatively optical), and a power source usually in the form of a battery. Other possible inclusions are energy harvesting modules, secondary ASICs, and possibly secondary communication devices (e.g. RS232 or USB).
    The base stations are one or more distinguished components of the WSN with much more computational, energy and communication resources. They act as a gateway between sensor nodes and the end user.

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