EC2024 - WIRELESS SENSOR

NETWORK DESIGN

UNIT I
INTRODUCTION

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Contents

Principle of Wireless Sensor Network - Challenges, Comparison with ad hoc

network, Node architecture and Network architecture, design principles, Service
interfaces, Gateway, Short range radio communication standards- IEEE
802.15.4, Zigbee.

Books Referred:
HolgerKarl , Andreas willig, “Protocol and Architecture for Wireless
Networks”, John Wiley Publication, 2006. Sensor

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Cellular and Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

• The current cellularwireless networks is classified as the infrastructure

dependent networks.

• The path setup for a call between two nodes, say, node C to node E, is completed through
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t h e base station, which is shown in the
 Cellular
wireless
networks

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• Ad hoc wireless networks are defined as the category of wireless networks that utilize
multi-hop radio relaying and are capable of operating without the support of any fixed
infrastructure (hence they are also called infrastructure less networks).

• The absence of any central coordinator or base station makes the routing a complex one
compared to cellular networks.

• The path setup for a call between two nodes, say, node C to node E, is completed through
the intermediate mobile node F as shown in Fig.3

• Wireless mesh networks and wireless sensor networks are specific examples of ad hoc
wireless networks.

• The major differences between cellular networksand ad hoc wireless

networks are
summarized in Table 1.
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 An ad hoc wireless
network

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• The presence of base stations simplifies routing and resource management in a
cellular network as the routing decisions are made in a centralized manner with more
information about the destination node.

• But in an ad hoc wireless network, the routing and resource management are done in a
distributed manner in which all nodes coordinate to enable communication among
themselves.

• This requires each node to be more intelligent so that it can function both as a network
host for transmitting and receiving data and as a network router for routing packets from
other nodes.

• Hence the mobile nodes in ad hoc wireless networks are more complex than their
counterparts in cellular networks.

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1. Wireless Sensor Networks

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• Sensor networks are a special category of ad hoc wireless networks that are used to provide
a wireless communication infrastructure among the sensors deployed in a
specific application domain.

• Sensor nodes are tiny devices that have the capability of sensing physical parameters,
processing the data gathered, and communicating over the network to the monitoring station.

• Sensor network is a collection of a large number of sensor nodes that are deployed in a
particular region. The activity of sensing can be periodic or sporadic.

• Periodic type: Sensing of environmental factors such as temperature, humidity, and nuclear
radiation.

• Sporadic type: Detecting border intrusion, sensing the temperature of a furnace to prevent it
rising beyond a threshold, and measuring the stress on critical structures or machinery.

• Some of the domains of application for sensor networks are military, health care, home
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c u r it y , and environmental 1
WSN application examples

❖ Disaster relief applications

❖ Environment control and biodiversity mapping
❖ Facility management
❖ Intelligent buildings
❖ Machine surveillance and preventive
maintenance
❖ Precision agriculture
❖ Medicine and health care
❖ Logistics
❖ Telematics
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 2. Challenges for WSNs

Characteristic requirements

❖ Type of service: The service type rendered by a conventional communication network is

evident.

❖ Quality of Service: In some cases, only occasional delivery of a packet can be more than
enough, in other cases, very high reliability requirements exist, In yet other cases, delay is
important when actuators are to be controlled in a real-time fashion by the sensor network.

❖ Fault tolerance: Since nodes may run out of energy or might be damaged, or since the
wireless communication between two nodes can be permanently interrupted, it is important
that the WSN as a whole is able to tolerate such faults. To tolerate node failure, redundant
deployment is necessary.

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❖ Lifetime: In many scenarios, nodes will have to rely on a limited supply of energy (using
batteries). A WSN must operate at least for a given mission time or as long as possible.
lifetime of a WSN becomes a very important figure of merit.

❖ Scalability: Since a WSN might includea large number of nodes, the

employed
architectures and protocols must be able scale to these numbers.

❖ Wide range of densities: In a WSN, the number of nodes per unit area – the density of the
network – can vary considerably. Different applications will have very different node
densities.

❖ Programmability: The nodes will have to react flexibly on changes in their tasks. These
nodes should be programmable, and their programming must be changeable during
operation when new tasks become important.

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Required mechanisms

❖ Multihop wireless communication: In particular, communication over long distances is

only possible using prohibitively high transmission power. The use of intermediate
nodes as relays can reduce the total required power.

❖ Energy-efficient operation: To support long lifetimes, energy-efficient operation is a

key technique. Options to look into include energy-efficient data transport between two
nodes.

❖ Auto-configuration: A WSN will have to configure most of its operational parameters

autonomously, independent of external configuration. Also, the network should be able
to tolerate failing nodes.

❖ Collaboration and in-network processing: In some applications, a single sensor is not

able to decide whether an event has happened but several sensors have to collaborate to
detect an event.
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❖ Data centric: Traditional communication networks are typically centered around the
transfer of data between two specific devices, each equipped with (at least) one network
address – the operation of such networks is thus address-centric. In a WSN, where nodes
are typically deployed redundantly to protect against node failures or to compensate for the
low quality of a single node’s actual sensing equipment, the identity of the particular node
supplying data becomes irrelevant. Hence, switching from an address-centric paradigm to a
data-centric paradigm is necessary.

❖ Locality: Nodes, which are very limited in resources like memory, should attempt to limit
the state that they accumulate during protocol processing to only information about their
direct neighbors. The hope is that this will allow the network to scale to large numbers of
nodes without having to rely on powerful processing at each single node.

❖ Exploit trade-offs: Node density: depending on application, deployment, and node failures
at runtime, the density of the network can change considerably – the protocols will have to
handle very different
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3. Comparison with ad hoc
Network
The issues that make sensor networks a distinct category of ad hoc wireless networks are the
following:

• Mobility of nodes: Mobility of nodes is not a mandatory requirement in sensor networks.

For example, the nodes deployed for periodic monitoring of soil properties are not
required to be mobile. However, the sensor nodes that are fitted on the bodies of patients in
a post-surgery ward of a hospital may be designed to support limited or partial mobility.
In general, sensor networks need not in all cases be designed to support mobility of sensor
nodes.

• Size of the network: The number of nodes in the sensor network can be much larger
than that in a typical ad hoc wireless network.

• Density of deployment: The density of nodes in a sensor network varies with the domain
of application. For example, military applications require high availability of the network,
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a k i n g redundancy a high
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• Power constraints: The power constraints in sensor networks are much more stringent than
those in ad hoc wireless networks. The power sources used in sensor networks can be
classified into the following three categories:

❖ Replenishable power source: In certain applications of sensor networks, the power

source can be replaced when the existing source is fully drained (e.g., wearable sensors
that are used to sense body parameters).
❖ Non-replenishable power source: In some specific applications of sensor networks, the
power source cannot be replenished once the network has been deployed. The
replacement of the sensor node is the only solution to it (e.g., deployment of sensor
nodes in a remote, hazardous terrain).
❖ Regenerative power source: Power sources employed in sensor networks that belong to
this category have the capability of regenerating power from the physical parameter
under measurement. For example, the sensor employed for sensing temperature at a
power plant can use power sources that can generate power by using appropriate
transducers.
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• Data/information fusion: The limited bandwidth and power constraints demand aggregation
of bits and information at the intermediate relay nodes that are responsible for relaying. Data
fusion refers to the aggregation of multiple packets into one before relaying it. This mainly
aims at reducing the bandwidth.

• Traffic distribution: The communication traffic pattern varies with the domain of
application in sensor networks. Environmental sensing application has a traffic with low
bandwidth. Detecting border intrusions in a military application has a traffic with high
bandwidth

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4. Single Node
Architecture
• Building a wireless sensor network first of all requires the constituting nodes to be developed
and available.

• These nodes have to meet the requirements that come from the specific requirements of a
given application: they might have to be small, cheap, or energy efficient, they have to be
equipped with the right sensors, the necessary computation and memory resources, and
they need adequate communication facilities.
1. Hardware components
a. Sensor node hardware
A basic sensor node comprises five main components:

(i) Controller: A controller to process all the relevant data, capable of executing arbitrary
code.
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 (ii) Memory: Some memory to store programs and intermediate data; usually, different types
of memory are used for programs and data.

(iii) Sensors and actuators: The actual interface to the physical world: devices
that can observe or control physical parameters of the environment.

iv) Communication: Turning nodes into a network requires a device for

sending and receiving information over a wireless channel.

(v) Power supply: As usually no tethered power supply is available, some form of batteries
are necessary to provide energy. Sometimes, some form of recharging by obtaining energy
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from t h e e nvironment is available
(b) Controller

• The controller is the core of a wireless sensor node.

• It collects data from the sensors, processes this data, decides when and where to send it,
receives data from other sensor nodes, and decides on the actuator’s behavior.

• It has to execute various programs, ranging from time-critical signal processing and
communication protocols to application programs; it is the Central Processing Unit
(CPU) of the node.

• The flexibility, performance, energy efficiency, and costs is very important factor for
designing a processors.

• Microcontrollers having high flexibility in connecting with other devices (like sensors), their
instruction set amenable to time-critical signal processing, and their typically low power
consumption and they often have memory built in.
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• A specialized case of programmable processors are Digital Signal Processors (DSPs). They
process large amounts of vectorial data and in broadband wireless communication, DSPs
are an appropriate and successfully used platform.

• But in wireless sensor networks, the requirements on wireless communication are usually
much more modest and the signal processing tasks related to the actual sensing of data is
also not overly complicated. Hence DSP are typically not required in a WSN node.

• Another option for the controller to use Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) or
Application- Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) instead.

• An FPGA can be reprogrammed to adapt to a changing set of requirements; however, this

can take time and energy – it is not practical to reprogram an FPGA at the same frequency
as a microcontroller could change between different programs.

• An ASIC is a specialized processor, have high-speed routers and switches. The typical
trade-off here is loss of flexibility in return for a considerably better energy efficiency and
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e r f o r m ance. It has more costly hardware 2
 • At the current stage of WSN technology, bigger flexibility and simpler usage of
microcontrollers makes them the generally preferred solution.

• In addition, splitting processing tasks between some low-level, fixed functionality put into a
very energy-efficient ASIC and high-level, flexible, relatively rarely invoked
processing on a microcontroller is an attractive design and research option.

• Some examples for microcontrollers include Intel StrongARM, Texas Instruments MSP
430, Atmel ATmega.

(c) Memory
• There is a need for Random Access Memory (RAM) to store intermediate sensor readings,
packets from other nodes, and so on.

• While RAM is fast, its main disadvantage is that it loses its content if power supply
is interrupted.
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• Program code can be stored in Read-Only Memory (ROM) or, more typically, in Electrically
Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory (EEPROM) or flash memory (the later being similar
to EEPROM but allowing data to be erased or written in blocks instead of only a byte at a time).

• Flash memory can also serve as intermediate storage of data in case RAM is insufficient or when the
power supply of RAM should be shut down for some time.

• Correctly dimensioning memory sizes, especially RAM, can be crucial with respect to manufacturing
costs and power consumption.

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(d) Communication device
• The communication device is used to exchange data between individual nodes.

• In some cases, wired communication can actually be the method of choice and is frequently
applied in many sensor networklike settings.

• The case of wireless communication is considerably more interesting. The first choice to
make is that of the transmission medium – the usual choices include radio frequencies,
optical communication, and ultrasound; other media like magnetic inductance are only used
in very specific cases.

• It provides relatively long range and high data rates, acceptable error rates at reasonable
energy expenditure, and does not require line of sight between sender and receiver.

• For a practical wireless, RF-based system, the carrier frequency has to be carefully chosen.
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 Transceivers

For actual communication, both a transmitter and a receiver are required in a sensor node. For
practical purposes, it is usually convenient to use a device that combines these two tasks in a
single entity. Such combined devices are called transceivers.

Transceiver tasks and characteristics

❖ Service to upper layer: A receiver has to offer certain services to the upper layers, most
notably to the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer. Sometimes, this service is packet
oriented; sometimes, a transceiver only provides a byte interface or even only a bit interface
to the microcontroller.

❖ Power consumption and energy efficiency: The simplest interpretation of energy

efficiency is the energy required to transmit and receive a single bit. Also, to be suitable for
use in WSNs, transceivers should be switchable between different states, for example, active
and sleeping.
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❖ Carrier frequency and multiple channels: Transceivers are available for different carrier
frequencies; evidently, it must match application requirements.

❖ State change times and energy: A transceiver can operate in different modes: sending or
receiving, use different channels, or be in different power-safe states. In any case, the time
and the energy required to change between two such states are important figures of merit.

❖ Data rates: Carrier frequency and used bandwidth together with modulation and coding
determine the gross data rate.

❖ Modulations: The transceivers typically support one or several of on/off-keying, ASK, FSK,
or similar modulations.

❖ Coding: Some transceivers allow various coding schemes to be selected.

❖ Transmission power control: Some transceivers can directly provide control

overthe
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❖ Noise figure
(NF):

❖ Gain: The gain is the ratio of the output signal power to the input signal power and is
typically given in dB. Amplifiers with high gain are desirable to achieve good energy
efficiency.

❖ Power efficiency: The efficiency of the radio front end is given as the ratio of the radiated
power to the overall power consumed by the front end.

❖ Receiver sensitivity: The receiver sensitivity (given in dBm) specifies the minimum signal
power at the receiver needed to achieve a prescribed Eb/N0 or a prescribed bit/packet error
rate.

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❖ Range: The range is considered in absence of interference; it evidently depends on the
maximum transmission power, on the antenna characteristics, on the attenuation caused by
the environment, which in turn depends on the used carrier frequency, on the
modulation/coding scheme that is used, and on the bit error rate that one is willing to accept
at the receiver.

❖ Blocking performance: The blocking performance of a receiver is its achieved bit

error rate in the presence of an interferer.

❖ Out of band emission: The inverse to adjacent channel suppression is the out of band
emission of a transmitter.

❖ Carrier sense and RSSI: In many medium access control protocols, sensing whether the
wireless channel, the carrier, is busy (another node is transmitting) is a critical
information. The following Requirements are,

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The received energy is above threshold; however, the underlying signal does not need
to comply with the modulation and spectral characteristics.

•A carrier has been detected, that is, some signal which complies with the modulation.
•Carrier detected and energy is present.

Also, the signal strength at which an incoming data packet has been received can provide
useful information. A receiver has to provide this information in the Received Signal Strength
Indicator (RSSI)

❖ Frequency stability: The frequency stability denotes the degree of variation from nominal
center frequencies when environmental conditions of oscillators like temperature or pressure
change.

❖ Voltage range: Transceivers should operate reliably over a range of supply voltages.
Otherwise, inefficient voltage stabilization circuitry is required.
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Transceiver
structure
•The radio frequency front end performs analog signal processing in the actual
radio
frequency band, whereas

•The baseband processor performs all signal processing in the digital domainand
communicates with a sensor node’s processor or other digital circuitry.

Between these two parts, a frequency conversion takes place, either directly or
via oneor several Intermediate Frequencys (IFs).

Some important elements of an RF front ends architecture is given below.

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The Power Amplifier (PA) accepts upconverted signals from the IF or baseband part and
amplifies them for transmission over the antenna.
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• The Low Noise Amplifier (LNA) amplifies incoming signals up to levels suitable for
further processing without significantly reducing the SNR.

• Elements like local oscillators or voltage-controlled oscillators and mixers are used for
frequency conversion from the RF spectrum to intermediate frequencies or to the baseband.
The incoming signal at RF frequencies fRF is multiplied in a mixer with a fixed-frequency
signal from the local oscillator (frequency fLO). The resulting intermediate-frequency
signal has frequency fLO − fRF.

Transceiver operational states

Many transceivers can distinguish four operational states

❖ Transmit: In the transmit state, the transmit part of the transceiver is active
andthe
antenna radiates energy.
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❖ Receive: In the receive state the receive part is active.

❖ Idle: A transceiver that is ready to receive but is not currently receiving anything is said to
be in an idle state. In this idle state, many parts of the receive circuitry are active, and
others can be switched off. A major source of power dissipation is leakage.

❖ Sleep: In the sleep state, significant parts of the transceiver are switched off. These sleep
states differ in the amount of circuitry switched off and in the associated recovery times
and startup energy.

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 Advanced radio concepts

Apart from these basic transceiver concepts, a number of advanced concepts

for radio
communication available, three of them are summarized here.

(i) Wakeup radio: To keep this specialized receiver simple, it suffices for it to raise an event
to notify other components of an incoming packet; upon such an event, the main receiver
can be turned on and perform the actual reception of the packet. Such receiver concepts
are called wakeup receivers. Their only purpose is to wake up the main receiver without
needing power.

(ii) Spread-spectrum transceivers: To overcome this limitation of ASK and FSK, the use of
spread-spectrum transceivers has been proposed. These transceivers, however, suffer
mostly from complex hardware and consequently higher prices.
(iii) Ultrawideband communication: Ultrawideband(UWB) communication is a
ra/2d0i2c4al change from conventional wireless
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(e) Sensors and actuators
Without the actual sensors and actuators, a wireless sensor network would be beside the point
entirely.

Sensors can be roughly categorized into three categories

❖ Passive omnidirectional sensors: These sensors can measure a physical quantity at the
point of the sensor node without actually manipulating the environment by active probing –
in this sense, they are passive. Typical examples for such sensors include thermometer, light
sensors, vibration, microphones, humidity.

❖ Passive, narrow-beam sensors: These sensors are passive as well, but have a well-defined
notion of direction of measurement. A typical example is a camera, which can “take
measurements” in a given direction, but has to be rotated if need be.

❖ Active sensors: This last group of sensors actively probes the environment, for example, a
sonar or radar sensor or some types of seismic sensors, which generate shock waves by small
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 Actuators

Actuators are just about as diverse as sensors, yet for the purposes of designing a WSN, they
are a bit simpler to take account of: In principle, all that a sensor node can do is to open or
close a switch or a relay or to set a value in some way. Whether this controls a motor, a light
bulb, or some other physical object is not really of concern to the way communication
protocols are designed.

(e) Power supply of sensor nodes

The power supply is a crucial system component. There are essentially two aspects: First,
storing energy and providing power in the required form; second, attempting to replenish
consumed energy by “scavenging” it from some node-external power source over time.

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(i) Storing energy: Batteries

Traditional batteries

The power source of a sensor node is a battery, either nonrechargeable (“primary batteries”) or,
if an energy scavenging device is present on the node, also rechargeable (“secondary
batteries”).Upon these batteries, very tough requirements are imposed:

❖ Capacity: They should have high capacity at a small weight, small volume, and low price.
The main metric is energy per volume, J/cm3.
❖ Capacity under load: They should withstand various usage patterns as a sensor node can
consume quite different levels of power over time and actually draw high current in certain
operation modes.
❖ Self-discharge: Their self-discharge should be low; they might also have to last for a long
time. Zinc-air batteries, for example, have only a very short life.

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❖ Efficient recharging: Recharging should be efficient even at low and intermittently
available recharge power; consequently, the battery should also not exhibit any “memory
effect”.

❖ Relaxation: Their relaxation effect – the seeming self-recharging of an empty or almost

empty battery when no current is drawn from it, based on chemical diffusion processes
within the cell.

Unconventional energy stores

Apart from traditional batteries, there are also other forms of energy reservoirs that can be
contemplated. In a wider sense, fuel cells also qualify as an electro-chemical storage of energy,
directly producing electrical energy by oxidizing hydrogen or hydrocarbon fuels.

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DC–DC Conversion

• Unfortunately, batteries alone are not sufficient as a direct power source for a sensor node. A
node on a weak battery will have a smaller transmission range than one with a full battery. A
DC – DC converter can be used to overcome this problem by regulating the voltage
delivered to the node’s circuitry.

• To ensure a constant voltage even though the battery’s supply voltage drops, the DC – DC
converter has to draw increasingly higher current from the battery when the battery is
already becoming weak, speeding up battery death.

(ii) Energy scavenging

• Some of the unconventional energy stores described above – fuel cells, micro heat engines,
radioactivity – convert energy from some stored, secondary form into electricity in a
less direct and easy to use way than a normal battery would do. The entire energy supply
is stored on the node itself – once the fuel supply is exhausted, the node fails.
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 • To ensure truly long-lasting nodes and wireless sensor networks, such a limited energy
store is unacceptable. Rather, energy from a node’s environment must be tapped into and
made available to the node – energy scavenging should take place.

❖ Photovoltaics: The well-known solar cells can be used to power sensor nodes. The
available power depends on whether nodes are used outdoors or indoors, and on time of
day and whether for outdoor usage.

❖ Temperature gradients: Differences in temperature can be directly converted to electrical

energy. Theoretically, even small difference of, for example, 5 K can produce considerable
power. Eg. Seebeck effect-based thermoelectric generators.

❖ Vibrations: One almost pervasive form of mechanical energy is vibrations: walls or

windows in buildings are resonating with cars or trucks passing in the streets, machinery
often has low frequency vibrations, ventilations also cause it, and so on.

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❖ Pressure variations: Somewhat akin to vibrations, a variation of pressure can also be used
as a power source. Such piezoelectric generators are in fact used already.

❖ Flow of air/liquid: Another often-used power source is the flow of air or liquid in wind
mills or turbines.

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5. Network Architecture

Sensor network scenarios

Optimization goals and figures of

merit

Design principles for WSNs

Service interfaces of WSNs

Gateway concepts

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1. Sensor network scenarios

Types of sources and sinks

• A source is any entity in the network that can provide information, that is, typically a
sensor node; it could also be an actuator node that provides feedback about an
operation.

• A sink, on the other hand, is the entity where information is required.

There are essentially three options for a sink:

2. It could belong to the sensor network as such and be just another sensor/actuator node.

3. The sink could be an actual device, for example, a handheld or PDA used to interact with
the sensor network.
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These main types of sinks

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1. Single-hop versus multihop networks

Singlehop networks:

• The simple, direct communication between source and sink is not always possible,
specifically in WSNs, which are intended to cover a lot of ground (e.g. in environmental or
agriculture applications) or that operate in difficult radio environments with strong
attenuation (e.g. in buildings).

• To overcome such limited distances, an obvious way out is to use relay stations, with the
data packets taking multi hops from the source to the sink.

Multihop networks:

• Multihopping is an evident and working solution to overcome problems with large distances
or obstacles, it has also been claimed to improve the energy efficiency of communication.
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 • Multihop networks operating in a store and forward fashion are considered here. In
such a network, a node has to correctly receive a packet before it can forward it
somewhere.
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5.1.2 Multiple sinks and sources
• In the most challenging case, multiple sources should send information to multiple sinks,
where either all or some of the information has to reach all or some of the sinks.

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5.1.3 Three types of mobility

Node mobility

The wireless sensor nodes themselves can be mobile. The meaning of such mobility is
highly
application dependent.

Sink mobility

The information sinks can be mobile. for example, a human user requested information via a
PDA while walking in an intelligent building.

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Event mobility

In applications like event detection and in particular in tracking applications, the cause of the
events or the objects to be tracked can be mobile.

As the event source moves through the network, it is accompanied by an area of activity
within the network – this has been called the frisbee model.

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2. Optimization goals and figures of merit

1. Quality of service

• QoS can be regarded as a low-level, networking-device-observable attribute – bandwidth,

delay, jitter, packet loss rate – or as a high-level, user-observable, so-called subjective
attribute like the perceived quality of a voice communication or a video transmission.

• High-level QoS attributes in WSN highly depend on the application. Some

generic
possibilities are:

Event detection/reporting probability

❑ What is the probability that an event that actually occurred is not detected or, more
precisely, not reported to an information sink.
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 Event classification error

❑ If events are not only to be detected but also to be classified, the error in classification
must be small.

Event detection delay

❑ What is the delay between detecting an event and reporting it to any/all interested sinks?

Missing reports

❑ In applications that require periodic reporting, the probability of undelivered reports

should
be small.

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 Approximation accuracy

❑ For function approximation applications (e.g. approximating the temperature as a

function of location for a given area), what is the average/maximum absolute or relative
error with respect to the actual function?

Tracking accuracy

❑ Tracking applications must not miss an object to be tracked, the reported position should
be as close to the real position as possible, and the error should be small.

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5.2.2 Energy efficiency

Energy per correctly received bit

• How much energy, counting all sources of energy consumption at all possible intermediate
hops, is spent on average to transport one bit of information (payload) from the source to
the destination?

Energy per reported (unique) event

• Similarly, what is the average energy spent to report one event?

Delay/energy trade-offs

• Some applications have a notion of “urgent” events, which can justify an increased energy
investment for a speedy reporting of such events.
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Network lifetime

• The time for which the network is operational or, put another way, the time during which
it
is able to fulfil its tasks (starting from a given amount of stored energy).

❑ Time to first node death

❑ Network half-life
❑ Time to partition
❑ Time to loss of coverage
❑ Time to failure of first event notification

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5.2.3 Scalability

• The ability to maintain performance characteristics irrespective of the size of the network is
referred to as scalability.

• With WSN potentially consisting of thousands of nodes, scalability is an evidently

indispensable requirement.

• Scalability is ill served by anyconstruct thatrequires globally consistent state,

such as addresses or routing table entries that have to be maintained.

5.2.4 Robustness

• Wireless sensor networks should also exhibit an appropriate robustness.

• They should not fail just because a limited number of nodes run out of energy, or because
their environment changes and severs existing radio links between two nodes – if
t/h7e/2s0e24failures have to be
8possible,
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5
3. Design principles for WSNs

1. Distributed organization

• Both the scalability and the robustness,make it imperativeto organize the network in
a
distributed fashion.

• The disadvantages of such a centralized approach are obvious as it introduces exposed

points of failure and is difficult to implement in a radio network, where participants only
have a limited communication range.

• Rather, the WSNs nodes should cooperatively organize the network, using
distributed
algorithms and protocols.

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• Self-organization is a commonly used term for this principle.
5.3.2 In-network processing

• When organizing a network in a distributed fashion, the nodes in the network are not only
passing on packets or executing application programs, they are also actively involved in
taking decisions about how to operate the network.

Aggregation

• Perhaps the simplest in-network processing technique is aggregation.

• The name aggregation stems from the fact that in nodes intermediate between sources
and sinks, information is aggregated into a condensed form out of information
provided by nodes further away from the sink.

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Distributed source coding and distributed compression

❑ Aggregation condenses and sacrifices information about the measured values in order not
to
have to transmit all bits of data from all sources to the sink.

Distributed and collaborative signal processing

❑ Distributed computations are mostly applicable to signal processing type algorithms;

typical
examples are beamforming and target tracking applications.

Mobile code/Agent-based networking

❑ With the possibility of executing programs in the network, other programming paradigms
or computational models are feasible. One such model is the idea of mobile code or
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5.3.3 Adaptive fidelity and accuracy

❖ The application should be able to adapt its requirements to the current status of the
network – how many nodes have already failed, how much energy could be scavenged from
the environment, what are the operational conditions (have critical events happened
recently), and so forth.
❖ Therefore, the application needs feedback from the network about its status to make such
decisions.

5.3.4 Data centricity

❖ Data-Centric Networking is a networking paradigm that focuses on the efficient

distribution and retrieval of data rather than the traditional approach of addressing
devices or hosts in a network.

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Implementation options for data-centric
networking
Overlay networks and distributed hash tables
Publish/Subscribe
Databases

5.3.5 Exploit location information

❑ Determine the location of sensor nodes.

❑ Once such information is available, it can simplify the design operation of
and communication protocols and can improve their energy efficiency
considerably.
5.3.6 Exploit activity patterns

❑ No event- small number of sensors

❑ Event present - Use large number of

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sensors.
5.3.7 Exploit
heterogeneity
Sensor nodes can be heterogenous by constructions, that is, some nodes have larger batteries,
farther-reaching communication devices, or more processing power.

5.3.8 Component-based protocol stacks and cross-layer optimization

4. Service interfaces of WSNs

1. Structuring application/protocol stack interfaces

❖ Component-based operating system andprotocol stack alreadyenablesonepossibility to

treat an application.

❖ It is just another component that can directly interact with other components using whatever
interface specification exists between them.
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❖ The application could even consist of several components, integrated at various places into
the protocol stack.

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2. Expressibility requirements for WSN service interfaces
Support for simple request/response interactions.

Support for asynchronous event notifications.

For both types of interactions, the addressees should be definable in several ways.
(Sync
and Async).

In-networking processing functionality has to be accessible.

Related to the specification of aggregation functions is the specification of the

required accuracy of a result.

Timeliness requirements about the delivery of data is a similar aspect.

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 To support the seamless connection of various nodes or entire networks as well as the simple
access to services in an “unknown” network, there is a need for an explicit description of the
set of available capabilities of the node/the network

Security requirements as well as properties have be somehow expressed.

While not a direct part of an actual service interface, additional management functionality.

5. Gateway concepts
1. The need for gateways

❖ For practical deployment, a sensor network only concerned with itself is insufficient.

❖ The network rather has to be able to interact with other information devices, for example, a
user equipped with a PDA moving in the coverage area of the network or with a remote
user, trying to interact with the sensor network via the Internet.
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5.5.2 WSN to Internet communication

❖ For example, a sensor node wants to deliver an alarm message to some Internet
host.
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❖ The first problem to solve is akin to ad hoc networks, namely, how to find the gateway from
within the network.

❖ Basically, a routing problem to a node thatoffers a specific service has to

be solved,
integrating routing and service discovery.

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5.5.3 Internet to WSN communication

❖ For example, a mobile requester equipped with a WSN transceiver, and also has all the
necessary protocol components at its disposal. In this case, the requesting terminal can be a
direct part of the WSN and no particular treatment is necessary.

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5.5.4 WSN tunneling

❖ In addition to these scenarios describing actual interactions between a WSN and Internet
terminals, the gateways can also act as simple extensions of one WSN to another WSN.

❖ The idea is to build a larger, “virtual” WSN out of separate parts, transparently “tunneling”
all protocol messages between these two networks and simply using the Internet as a
transport network.

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6. Short range radio communication standards

1. The IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol

❖ The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) finalized the IEEE 802.15.4
standard in October 2003.

❖ The standard covers the physical layernd the MAC layer of a low-rate Wireless Personal Area
Network (WPAN).

❖ Sometimes, people confuse IEEE 802.15.4 with ZigBee5, an emerging standard from the
ZigBee alliance.

❖ ZigBee uses the services offered by IEEE 802.15.4 and adds network construction (star
networks, peer-to-peer/ mesh networks, cluster-tree networks), security, application services,
and more.
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❖ The targeted applications for IEEE 802.15.4 are in the area of wireless sensor networks, home
automation, home networking, connecting devices to a PC, home security, and so on.

❖ The physical layer offers bitrates of 20 kbps (a single channel in the frequency range 868–
868.6 MHz), 40 kbps (ten channels in the range between 905 and 928 MHz) and 250 kbps (16
channels in the 2.4 GHz ISM band between 2.4 and 2.485 GHz with 5-MHz spacing
between the center frequencies).

❖ There are a total of 27 channels available, but the MAC protocol uses only one of these
channels at a time.

❖ The MAC protocol combines both schedule-based as well as contention-based schemes.

6.1.1 Network architecture and types/roles of nodes

The standard distinguishes on the MAC layer two types of nodes:

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❖ A Full Function Device (FFD) can operatein three different roles: It can be a
PAN coordinator (PAN = Personal Area Network), a simple coordinator or a device.

❖ A Reduced Function Device (RFD) can operate only as a device.

❖ The PAN is identified by a 16-bit PAN Identifier and one of its coordinators is designated as
a
PAN coordinator

A coordinator handles among others the following tasks:

It manages a list of associated devices.

It allocates short addresses to its devices.
In the beaconed mode of IEEE 802.15.4, it transmits regularly frame beacon
packets
announcing the PAN identifier, a list of outstanding frames, and other parameters.
It exchanges data packets with devices and with peer coordinators.
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6.1.2 Superframe structure

❖ The coordinator of a star network operating in the beaconed mode organizes

channel
access and data transmission with the help of a superframe structure.

❖ The superframe is subdivided into an active period and an inactive period.

❖ The active period is subdivided into 16 time slots. The first time slot is occupied by the
beacon frame and the remaining time slots are partitioned into a Contention Access Period
(CAP) followed by a number (maximal seven) of contiguous Guaranteed Time Slots (GTSs).

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6.1.3 GTS
management
❖ The coordinator allocates GTS to devices only when the latter send appropriate request packets
during the CAP.

❖ One flag in the request indicates whether the requested time slot is a transmit slot or a receive
slot.

❖ In a transmit slot, the device transmits packets to the coordinator and in a receive slot the
data flows in the reverse direction.

6.1.4 Data transfer procedures

❖ If the device has allocated a receive GTS and when the packet/acknowledgment/IFS cycle fits
into these, the coordinator simply

❖ Transmits the packet in the allocated time slot without further coordination. The device has to
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6.1.5 Slotted CSMA-CA protocol

❖ When nodes have to send data or management/control packets during the CAP, they use a
slotted CSMA protocol.

❖ To reduce the probability of collisions, the protocol uses random delays.

6.1.6 Nonbeaconed mode

❖ The IEEE 802.15.4 protocol offers a nonbeaconed mode besides the beaconed mode.

❖ The lack of beacon packetstakes away a good opportunity for devicesto acquire
time synchronization with the coordinator.

❖ All packets from devices are transmitted using an unslotted CSMA-CA protocol.

❖ Coordinators must be switched on constantly but devices can follow their own sleep schedule.
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6.2 Zigbee

❖ ZigBee is an open, global, packet-based protocol designed to provide an easy-to-use

architecture for secure, reliable, low-power wireless networks.
❖ ZigBee is the Personal Area Network of task group 4, so it is based on IEEE 802.15.4
and is created by Zigbee Alliance.

❖ Frequency Bands - 2.4 GHz (Across the

World)
❖ Zigbee used - Unlicensed bands
❖ Data Rate - 250KB/s
❖ Range - 10 to 100 meters

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Types of ZigBee
Devices
1. ZigbeeCoordinator Device: It communicates with routers. This device is
used for connecting the devices.

2. Zigbee Router: It is used for passing the data between devices.

3. Zigbee End Device: It is the device that is going to be controlled.

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Zigbee Based Network Topologies

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Topologies
ZigBee-based WSNs have three network topologies:

1) Star topology - The star topology consists of a coordinator and several end devices
(nodes). In this topology, the end device communicates only with the coordinator. Any
packet exchange between end devices must go through the coordinator.

2) Mesh topology (Or) Peer-to-Peer network - consists of one coordinator, several

routers, and end devices. A mesh topology is a multi-hop network; packets pass
through multiple hops to reach their destination.

3) Cluster tree topology - A cluster tree topology is a special case of tree topology in
which a parent with its children is called a cluster. Each cluster is identified by a cluster
ID. ZigBee does not support cluster tree topology, but IEEE 802.15.4 does support it.

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IEEE802.15.4/ZigBee protocol stack
architecture

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Protocol stack
architecture
Physical Layer (PHY)
❖ This layer does modulation and demodulation operations upon transmitting and receiving
signals respectively.
❖ Operating Frequency Bands
•Channel 0: 868 MHz (Europe)
•Channel 1-10: 915 MHz (the US and Australia)
•Channel 11-26: 2.4 GHz (Across the World)

• Medium Access Control layer (MAC layer):

❖ The layer is responsible for the interface between the physical and network layer.
❖ The MAC layer is also responsible for providing PAN ID andalso network
discovery through beacon requests.
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Mac layer

CHANNEL ACCESS:
❖ Contention-Based Method - Carrier-Sense Multiple Access With Collision
Mechanism (CSMA-CA) Avoidance
❖ Contention Free Method (Coordinator dedicates a specific time slotto each
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Network Layer
❖ It is responsible for topology construction and maintenance as well as naming and binding
services, which include the tasks of addressing, routing, and security.

❖ Thenetwork layer should be self-organizing and self-maintaining to minimize

energy consumption and total cost.

APPLICATION LAYER
❖ The application layer in the Zigbee stack is the highest protocol layer, and it consists of the
application support sub-layer and Zigbee device object.

❖ It contains manufacturer-defined applications.

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Zigbee
Applications
Home Automation
Medical Data Collection
Industrial Control Systems
meter reading system
light control system
Commercial
Government Markets
Worldwide
Home Networking

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 COMPARISON BETWEEN BLUETOOTH &
S. No. ZIGBEE Bluetooth Zigbee
The Bluetooth SIG (Special Interest Group) is the The Zigbee Alliance manages Zigbee and tests and
1. organization responsible for managing Bluetooth approves Zigbee-based devices. IEEE standardizes all
standards and devices. Zigbee-based protocols.

2. Bluetooth was developed under IEEE 802.15.1. It was developed under IEEE 802.15.4.

The frequency range supported in Zigbee is mostly 2.4

3. The frequency range 2.4 GHz to 2.483 GHz.
GHz worldwide.

4. There are seventy nine RF channels in Bluetooth. There are sixteen RF channels in zigbee.

Whereas it also uses BPSK and QPSK modulation

5. It uses GFSK modulation technique.
techniques like UWB.
Zigbee devices has generic topologies, including a star,
Bluetooth networks using the point-to-point,
mesh, and others.
master-slave approach in which there is one master
6. Zigbee-based network topologies. Zigbee Coordinator,
and up to seven slaves form a piconet, which leads to
Zigbee Router, and Zigbee Endpoint nodes make up
forming a scatter net linking two or more piconets.
any Zigbee network.

Zigbee also requires low bandwidth but greater than

7. Bluetooth requires low bandwidth. Bluetooth’s bandwidth most of time.

8 .
/ 2 4Bluetooth’s protocol stack is 250K bytes in size.
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