WASN

UNIT-3

What are Wireless Sensor Networks?

 As mentioned earlier, a typical sensor network consists of sensors, controller and a

communication system. If the communication system in a Sensor Network is
implemented using a Wireless protocol, then the networks are known as Wireless
Sensor Networks or simply WSNs.

 According to technologists and researchers, Wireless Sensor Networks as an entity is an

important technology for the twenty first century. Recent developments in MEMS
Sensors (Micro Electro Mechanical System) and Wireless Communication has enabled
cheap, low power, tiny and smart sensors, which can be deployed in a wide area and
can be interconnected through wireless links and internet for various civilian and
military applications.
 A Wireless Sensor Network consists of Sensor Nodes (we will see about this later) that
are deployed in high density and often in large quantities and support sensing, data
processing, embedded computing and connectivity.
Motivation for Wireless Sensor Networks

 The recent developments in engineering, communication and networking has led to

new sensor designs, information technologies and wireless systems. Such advanced
sensors can be used as a bridge between the physical world with the digital world.
 Sensors are used in numerous devices, industries, machines and environment and help
in avoiding infrastructure failures, accidents, conserving natural resources, preserving
wildlife, increase productivity, provide security etc.
 The use of distributed sensor network or system has also been contributed by the
technological advances in VLSI, MEMS and Wireless Communication.
 With the help of modern semiconductor technology, you can develop more powerful
microprocessors that are significantly smaller in size when compared to the previous
generation products. This miniaturization of processing, computing and sensing
technologies has led to tiny, low-power and cheap sensors, controllers and actuators.

Elements of WSN

A typical wireless sensor network can be divided into two elements. They are:

1. Sensor Node
2. Network Architecture

Challenges of WSN:

 Quality of Service
 Security Issue
 Energy Efficiency
 Network Throughput
 Performance
 Ability to cope with node failure
 Cross layer optimization
 Scalability to large scale of deployment
Components of WSN:

1. Sensors:
Sensors in WSN are used to capture the environmental variables and which is used for
data acquisition. Sensor signals are converted into electrical signals.
2. Radio Nodes:
It is used to receive the data produced by the Sensors and sends it to the WLAN access
point. It consists of a microcontroller, transceiver, external memory, and power source.
3. WLAN Access Point:
It receives the data which is sent by the Radio nodes wirelessly, generally through the
internet.
4. Evaluation Software:
The data received by the WLAN Access Point is processed by a software called as
Evaluation Software for presenting the report to the users for further processing of the
data which can be used for processing, analysis, storage, and mining of the data.

Application of Wireless Sensor Networks

1. Military Applications: Possibly, WSNs is an essential fragment of military intelligence,

facility, control, communications, computing, frontline surveillance, investigation and
targeting systems.

2. Applications in Area Monitoring: In the aspect, the sensor nodes are positioned over an
area where some display is to be observed. When the sensors notice the occurrence
being observed (such as temperature, pressure etc), the occurrence is conveyed to one
of the base stations (BSs), which then takes action appropriately.

3. Transportation Applications: Instantaneous traffic statistics is being composed by WSNs

to later forage transportation models and keep the drivers on alert of possible
congestion and traffic difficulties.

4. Medical/Health Applications: Some of the medical/health benefits of WSNs are in the

areas of diagnostics, investigative, and drug administration as well as management,
supporting interfaces for the incapacitated, integrated patient monitoring and
 management, tele-monitoring of human physiological information, and tracking and
monitoring medical practitioners or patients inside the medical facility. According to
Nwankwo et al.nanoinformatics and nanomedicine are now beginning to advance in
clinical applications via the use of biosensors.

5. Environmental Applications: The term “Environmental Sensor Networks (ESNs)” has

developed to cover several benefits of WSNs to environmental and earth science study.
This comprises of sensing oceans, seas, glaciers, atmosphere, volcanoes, forest, etc.
However, there are presently some biosensors that have been developed for use in
agricultural and environmental sustainability [29]. Some other key aspects are; air
contamination monitoring and management, forest fires discovery/detection,
greenhouse (GH) monitoring and management, and Landslide discovery/detection.

6. Structural Applications: WSNs can be employed for monitoring the movement of

diverse structural projects such as buildings and other infrastructural projects like
flyovers, bridges, roads, embankments, tunnels etc., allowing
manufacturing/engineering practices to monitor possessions remotely without
necessarily visiting the sites, and this would reduce expenses that would have been
incurred from physical site visitations.

7. Industrial Applications: WSNs have been advanced for “Technological Condition-based

Maintenance (TCBM)” since they could offer momentous cost reductions/investments
and allow innovative functionalities. In wired classifications, the installation of adequate
sensors is habitually limited by the amount involve in wiring

8. Agricultural Applications: The employment of WSNs has been reported assist farmers in
various aspects such as the maintenance of wiring in a problematic environment,
irrigation mechanisation which aids more resourceful water use and reduction of
wastes.

Classification of Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks are extremely application specific and are deployed according to the
requirements of the application. Hence, the characteristics of one WSN will be different to that
of another WSN.
Irrespective of the application, Wireless Sensor Networks in general can be classified into the
following categories.

 Static and Mobile WSN

 Deterministic and Nondeterministic WSN
 Single Base Station and Multi Base Station WSN
 Static Base Station and Mobile Base Station WSN
 Single-hop and Multi-hop WSN
 Self – Reconfigurable and Non – Self – Configurable WSN
 Homogeneous and Heterogeneous WSN

Static and Mobile WSN

In many applications, all the sensor nodes are fixed without movement and these are static
networks. Some applications, especially in biological systems, require mobile sensor nodes.
These are known as mobile networks. An example of mobile network is animal monitoring.

Deterministic and Nondeterministic WSN

In a deterministic WSN, the position of a sensor node is calculated and fixed. The pre-planned
deployment of sensor nodes is possible in only a limited number of applications. In most
application, determining the position of sensor nodes is not possible due to several factors like
harsh environment or hostile operating conditions. Such networks are nondeterministic and
require a complex control system

Single Base Station and Multi Base Station WSN

In a single base station WSN, only a single base station is used which is located close to the
sensor node region. All the sensor nodes communicate with this base station, in case of a multi
base station WSN, more than base station is used and a sensor node can transfer data to the
closest base station.

Static Base Station and Mobile Base Station WSN

Similar to sensor nodes, even base stations can be either static or mobile. A static base station
has a fixed position usually close to the sensing region. A mobile base station moves around the
sensing region so that the load of sensor nodes is balanced.

Single-hop and Multi-hop WSN

In a single-hop WSN, the sensor nodes are directly connected to the base station. In case of
multi-hop WSN, peer nodes and cluster heads are used to relay the data so that energy
consumption is reduced.

Self – Reconfigurable and Non – Self – Configurable WSN

In a non – Self – Configurable WSN, the sensor networks cannot organize themselves in a
network and rely on a control unit to collect information. In most WSNs, the sensor nodes are
capable of organizing and maintaining the connection and work collaboratively with other
sensor nodes to accomplish the task.

Homogeneous and Heterogeneous WSN

In a homogeneous WSN, all the sensor nodes have similar energy consumption, computational
power and storage capabilities. In case on heterogenous WSN, some sensor nodes have higher
computational power and energy requirements than other and the processing and
communication tasks are divided accordingly.

Sensor Network Architecture

Sensor Network Architecture is used in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). It can be used in
various places like schools, hospitals, buildings, roads, etc for various applications like disaster
management, security management, crisis management, etc.

There are 2 types of architecture used in WSN: Layered Network Architecture, and Clustered
Architecture. These are explained as following below.

1. Layered Network Architecture:

Layered Network Architecture makes use of a few hundred sensor nodes and a single powerful
base station. Network nodes are organized into concentric Layers.
It consists of 5 layers and three cross layers.

The 5 layers are:

 Application Layer
 Transport Layer
  Network Layer
 Data Link Layer
 Physical Layer

The cross layers consist of the following:

 Power Management Plane

 Mobility Management Plane
 Task Management Plane

The advantage of using Layered Network Architecture is that each node participates only in
short-distance, low power transmissions to nodes of the neighbouing nodes because of which
power consumption is less as compared to other Sensor Network Architecture. It is scalable and
has a higher fault tolerance.

2. Clustered Network Architecture:

In Clustered Network Architecture, Sensor Nodes autonomously clubs into groups called
clusters. It is based on the Leach Protocol which makes use of clusters. Leach Protocol stands
for Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy.

Properties of Leach Protocol:

 It is a 2-tier hierarchy clustering architecture.

 It is a distributed algorithm for organizing the sensor nodes into groups called clusters.
  The cluster head nodes in each of the autonomously formed clusters create the Time-
division multiple access (TDMA) schedules.
 It makes use of the concept called Data Fusion which makes it energy efficient.

Here:

Clustered Network Architecture is a very useful sensor network because of the property of Data
Fusion. Inside each cluster, each node communicate with the cluster head to gather the
information. All the clusters which are formed share their gathered information to the base
station. The cluster formation and selection of cluster head inside each cluster is an
independent and autonomous distributed process.
Physical Layer for Wireless Sensor Networks

 The main concern of the physical layer is modulation and demodulation of digital data,
i.e. transmission and reception of the data. This is done by the transceivers in the sensor
nodes. The main functions of physical layer are carrier frequency selection and
generation, encryption and decryption, modulation and demodulation, transmission and
reception of data.

 Wireless sensor network generally work in ISM bands. But many other standards like
802.11b and Bluetooth also use the same band, so all systems, in this band have to be
robust against interference form other systems.

 The most important parameters which are to be considered while designing Physical
layer in wireless sensor networks are:

1. Low Power Consumption.

2. Low Transmission and Reception range.
3. Interference from other systems, working in the same band.
4. Low complexity.
5. Low duty cycle, i.e. most of the time sensor nodes are switched off.
6. Low data rates most of the time and high data rate only for a short period of
time.

 The most challenging aspect in physical layer design for sensor networks is to find, low
cost transceivers which consume less power, simple modulation schemes which are
robust enough to provide required service.
Link Layer for Wireless Sensor Networks
MAC Layer

The MAC and the routing layers are the most active research areas in WSNs. Therefore, an
exhaustive discussion of all schemes is impossible. However, most of the existing work
addresses how to make SNs sleep as long as possible. Consequently, these proposals often tend
to include at least some aspects of TDMA. The wireless channel is primarily a broadcast
medium. All nodes within radio range of a node can hear its transmission. This can be used as a
uni cast medium by specifically addressing a particular node and all other nodes can drop the
packet they receive. There are two types of schemes available to allocate a single broadcast
channel among competing nodes: Static Channel Allocation and Dynamic Channel Allocation.

 Static Channel Allocation: In this category of protocols, if there are N SNs, the
bandwidth is divided In to N equal portions in frequency (FDMA), in time (TDMA), in
code (CDMA), in space (SDMA) or In schemes such as OFDM or are only a small and
fixed number of SNs, each of which has Buffered (heavy) load of data
 Dynamic Channel Allocation: In this category of protocols, there is no fixed assignment
of bandwidth. When the number of active SNs changes dynamically and data becomes
burst at arbitrary SNs, it is most advisable to use dynamic channel allocation scheme.
These are contention-based schemes, where SNs contend for the channel when they
have data while minimizing collisions with other SNs transmissions. When there is a
 collision, the SNs are forced to retransmit data, thus leading to increased wastage of
energy and unbounded delay.

Wireless sensor networks use a group of autonomous sensors for different purposes in a large
variety of applications. Such networks have the ability to be self organized and failure-adaptive
to provide an efficient and reliable network that carries the sensed data towards the sink
successfully. To provide efficient and reliable services, many factors have to be considered such
as the application environment requirement, reliability of the protocol used in the network and
the network consistency. MAC layer is a major reason to provide the reliability and efficiency
for WSN. MAC is responsible for channel access policies, scheduling, buffer management and
error control. In WSN we need a MAC protocol to consider energy efficiency, reliability, low
access delay and high throughput as major priorities to accommodate with sensor’s limited
resources and to avoid redundant power consumption