Wireless sensor network

Typical Multihop Wireless Sensor Network Architecture

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of spatially distributed autonomous

sensors to cooperatively monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as
temperature, sound, vibration, pressure, motion or pollutants. The development of
wireless sensor networks was motivated by military applications such as
battlefield surveillance and are now used in many industrial and civilian
application areas, including industrial process monitoring and control, machine
health monitoring, environment and habitat monitoring, healthcare applications,
home automation, and traffic control.[2][5]

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. A sensor node
might vary in size from that of a shoebox down to the size of a grain of dust,
although functioning "motes" of genuine microscopic dimensions have yet to be
created. The cost of sensor nodes is similarly variable, ranging from hundreds of
dollars to a few pennies, 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.

A sensor network normally constitutes a wireless ad-hoc network, meaning that

each sensor supports a multi-hop routing algorithm where nodes function as
forwarders, relaying data packets to a base station.

In computer science and telecommunications, wireless sensor networks are an

active research area with numerous workshops and conferences arranged each
year.
Contents

• 1 Applications
o 1.1 Area monitoring
o 1.2 Environmental Monitoring
 1.2.1 Greenhouse Monitoring
 1.2.2 Landslide detection
o 1.3 Industrial Monitoring
 1.3.1 Machine Health Monitoring
o 1.4 Water/Wastewater Monitoring
 1.4.1 Landfill Ground Well Level Monitoring and Pump
Counter
 1.4.2 Water Tower Level Monitoring
 1.4.3 Agriculture
o 1.5 Fleet monitoring
• 2 Characteristics
• 3 Platforms
o 3.1 Standards and specifications
o 3.2 Hardware
o 3.3 Software
 3.3.1 Operating systems
 3.3.2 Implementations
 3.3.3 Algorithms
• 4 Simulators
• 5 Data visualization
• 6 Information Fusion

• 7 Conclusion.

Applications

The applications for WSNs are varied, typically involving some kind of
monitoring, tracking, or controlling. Specific applications include habitat
monitoring, object tracking, fire detection, land slide detection and traffic
monitoring. In a typical application, a WSN is scattered in a region where it is
meant to collect data through its sensor nodes.

Area monitoring

Area monitoring is a common application of WSNs. In area monitoring, the WSN

is deployed over a region where some phenomenon is to be monitored. For
example, a large quantity of sensor nodes could be deployed over a battlefield to
detect enemy intrusion. When the sensors detect the event being monitored (heat,
pressure, sound, light, electro-magnetic field, vibration, etc.), the event is reported
to one of the base stations, which then takes appropriate action (e.g., send a message
on the internet or to a satellite). Similarly, wireless sensor networks can use a range of
sensors to detect the presence of vehicles ranging from motorcycles to train cars.

Environmental Monitoring

A number of WSNs have been deployed for environmental monitoring. Many of

these have been short lived, often due to the prototype nature of the projects.
Examples of longer-lived deployments are monitoring the state of permafrost in
the Swiss Alps: The PermaSense Project, PermaSense Online Data Viewer
ASTEC Project.and glacier monitoring.

Greenhouse Monitoring

Wireless sensor networks are also used to control the temperature and humidity
levels inside commercial greenhouses. When the temperature and humidity drops
below specific levels, the greenhouse manager must be notified via e-mail or cell
phone text message, or host systems can trigger misting systems, open vents, turn
on fans, or control a wide variety of system responses. Because some wireless
sensor networks are easy to install, they are also easy to move as the needs of the
application change.

Landslide detection

A landslide detection system, make use of a wireless sensor network to detect the
slight movements of soil that may occur during a landslide. And through the data
gathered it is possible to know the occurrence of landslides long before it actually
happens.

Industrial Monitoring

Machine Health Monitoring

Wireless sensor networks have been developed for machinery condition-based

maintenance (CBM) as they offer significant cost savings and enable new
functionalities. In wired systems, the installation of enough sensors is often limited
by the cost of wiring, which runs between $10–$1000 per foot.Previously
inaccessible locations, rotating machinery, hazardous or restricted areas, and
mobile assets can now be reached with wireless sensors. Often, companies use
manual techniques to calibrate, measure, and maintain equipment. This labor-
intensive method not only increases the cost of maintenance but also makes the
system prone to human errors. Especially in US Navy shipboard systems, reduced
manning levels make it imperative to install automated maintenance monitoring
systems. Wireless sensor networks play an important role in providing this
capability.

Water/Wastewater Monitoring

There are many opportunities for using wireless sensor networks within the
water/wastewater industries. Facilities not wired for power or data transmission
can be monitored using industrial wireless I/O devices and sensors powered using
solar panels or battery packs.

Landfill Ground Well Level Monitoring and Pump Counter

Wireless sensor networks can be used to measure and monitor the water levels
within all ground wells in the landfill site and monitor leachate accumulation and
removal. A wireless device and submersible pressure transmitter monitors the
leachate level. The sensor information is wirelessly transmitted to a central data
logging system to store the level data, perform calculations, or notify personnel
when a service vehicle is needed at a specific well.

It is typical for leachate removal pumps to be installed with a totalizing counter

mounted at the top of the well to monitor the pump cycles and to calculate the total
volume of leachate removed from the well. For most current installations, this
counter is read manually. Instead of manually collecting the pump count data,
wireless devices can send data from the pumps back to a central control location to
save time and eliminate errors. The control system uses this count information to
determine when the pump is in operation, to calculate leachate extraction volume,
and to schedule maintenance on the pump.

Water Tower Level Monitoring

Water towers are used to add water and create water pressure to small
communities or neighborhoods during peak use times to ensure water pressure is
available to all users. Maintaining the water levels in these towers is important and
requires constant monitoring and control. A wireless sensor network that includes
submersible pressure sensors and float switches monitors the water levels in the
tower and wirelessly transmits this data back to a control location. When tower
water levels fall, pumps to move more water from the reservoir to the tower are
turned on.
Agriculture

Using wireless sensor networks within the agricultural industry is increasingly

common. Gravity fed water systems can be monitored using pressure transmitters
to monitor water tank levels, pumps can be controlled using wireless I/O devices,
and water use can be measured and wirelessly transmitted back to a central control
center for billing. Irrigation automation enables more efficient water use and
reduces waste.

Fleet monitoring

It is possible to put a mote with a GPS module on-board of each vehicle of a fleet.
The mote gathers it's position via the GPS module, and reports its coordinates so
that the location is tracked in real-time. The motes can be equipped with
temperature sensors to avoid any disruption of the cold chain, helping to ensure
the safety of food, pharmaceutical and chemical shipments.

In situations where there is not reliable GPS coverage, like inside buildings,
garages and tunnels, using information from GSM cells is an alternative for to
GPS localization.

Unique characteristics of a WSN include:

• Limited power they can harvest or store

• Ability to withstand harsh environmental conditions
• Ability to cope with node failures
• Mobility of nodes
• Dynamic network topology
• Communication failures
• Heterogeneity of nodes
• Large scale of deployment
• Unattended operation
• Node capacity is scalable,only limited by bandwidth of gateway node.

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. RS-232 or USB).
Simulators

Flooding Technique in Wireless Sensor Network by Qasim Siddique

There are network simulator platforms specifically designed to model and simulate
Wireless Sensor Networks, like TOSSIM, which is a part of TinyOS and COOJA
which is a part of Contiki. Traditional network simulators like ns-2 have also been
used. A platform independent component based simulator with wireless sensor
network framework, J-Sim can also be used. In addition, there is a simulator
focused on the evaluation of topology control protocols in WSNs called Atarraya.
An extensive list of simulation tools for Wireless Sensor Networks can be found at
the CRUISE WSN Simulation Tool Knowledgebase.

Based on the OMNeT++ network simulator architecture, Mobility Framework and

Castalia can be used for simulation of wireless sensor networks.

Based on Matlab, the Prowler (Probabilistic Wireless Network Simulator) toolbox

is available. JProwler is a version of Prowler written in Java.

QualNet Network Simulator can be used to simulate Wireless Sensor Network

Developed using C# under Visual Studio 2008, WSNSim is available for

download from WSNPedia. While WSNSim comes equipped with the behaviour
of the classic LEACH and HEED clustering protocols in WSN, it is mainly a
simulation framework that can be adopted to try other clustering and/or routing
protocols in WSN, on a common testbench. It also introduces the t-SNIPER
algorithm that utilizes a socio-economic model of trust based routing scheme.
Data visualization

The data gathered from wireless sensor networks is usually saved in the form of
numerical data in a central base station. Additionally, the Open Geospatial
Consortium (OGC) is specifying standards for interoperability interfaces and
metadata encodings that enable real time integration of heterogeneous sensor
webs into the Internet, allowing any individual to monitor or control
Wireless Sensor Networks through a Web Browser. There are several
techniques to retrieve data from the nodes, some of the protocols rely on
flooding mechanisms, other map the data to nodes by applying the concept of
DHT.

Information Fusion

In wireless sensor networks, information fusion, also called data fusion, has been
developed for processing sensor data by filtering, aggregating, and making
inferences about the gathered data. Information fusion deals with the combination
of multiple sources to obtain improved information: cheaper, greater quality or
greater relevance. Within the wireless sensor networks domain, simple
aggregation techniques such as maximum, minimum, and average, have been
developed for reducing the overall data traffic to save energy.

Conclusion

 To realize the ubiquitous computing in human life a sensor network

may be the powerful
 tool, because they can be deployed at the places where a man can not
reach.
 However it is
 negative sides also because the power of sensor node can not be
refreshed.To realize the power
 control and power saving every layer take care of that. At Physical
layer modulation schemes are
 chosen according to that. At MAC layer contention free schemes are
used. At
 Network layer multihop routing and data centric routing is used. At
the time when guaranteed delivery is required TCP can also be used.
 TCP is used in addition to link layer retransmission. Software which is
used on application layer
 also should be power aware software.