Abstract
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be classified among the blazing domains of research in the recent era. WSNs have enormous day-to-day life real-time applications due their low priced, self-computing, powerful, autonomous small sensor nodes which have a small storage capacity, restricted non-removable non-rechargeable battery, and a restricted computational capacity. The applicability of WSNs are in almost all domains, like observing environmental conditions, human healthcare tracking systems, position tracking and monitoring, industry automation, process tracking and controlling, tracking and monitoring objects, mammal, human being, and control, and many more. This chapter briefly explores the basic concepts, components, network architecture, design issues, challenges, routing protocols, application domains, implemented applications, etc. in the field of WSNs. It also focuses on the performance evaluation parameters to check, analyze, diagnose, examine, and determine the performance of WSNs. At the end, the chapter concludes with the scope of research in the field of wireless sensor networks.
TopIntroduction
Nowadays, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) (Buratti et al., 2009), (Yick et al., 2008), become more trendy, rising and one of the blazing research areas because of its broad variety of application in large areas. These types of networks (Akyildiz et al., 2007), (Puccinelli & Haenggi, 2005) are mainly composed of a very small, economical, low powered, non-rechargeable, non-removable onboard battery driven, autonomous, supportive, distributed sensor nodes that are designed for an application specific task. These types of nodes are deployed densely in big number in a region of application, as shown in Figure 1, from where the important data is to be gathered and sent to the sink node or base station (BS) which is generally located away from this region (Akyildiz et al., 2002), (Akyildiz et al., 2002). The data collected from these types of sensor nodes can be further processed and analyzed. In such types of networks (Tilak, 2002), there is no fixed network infrastructure, that’s why the sensor nodes must support and cooperate to accomplish communication, global control and information aggregation.
Figure 1.
Sample Structures of Wireless Sensor Networks
Generally, a sensor node (Akyildiz & Vuran, 2010) normally consists of four modules: a sensing unit for data acquirement from the region of interest, a small computational unit to process the sensed data, a communication unit to transmit the sensed data and a power unit consisting of a non- rechargeable, non-removable limited onboard battery. It may also have some additional components like mobilzer, a GPS system, power generator etc., which can be integrated in the basic model of sensor node depending on the type of applications. Figure 2 shows hardware structure of such type of node. The components of a sensor are described below.
Figure 2. Hardware Architecture of a Sensor