Wireless Sensor Network

Fundamentals
Steven Lanzisera
Environmental Energy Technologies Division, LBNL
8 February 2010
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Overview

• Wireless sensor networks

• The fundamentals
– Network lifetime
– Wireless networking
– Wireless communication
– The radio frequency transceiver
• Interoperability
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What We Won’t Discuss

• Particular applications
• Jargon soup
– IEEE 802.15.4, IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n
– Zigbee, Bluewave, etc.
• Companies and their technologies
– Dust Networks, Arch Rock, Sensicast, etc.
• Specific protocols
• Latency, feedback control, etc.
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Overview

• Wireless sensor networks

• The fundamentals
– Network lifetime
– Wireless networking
– Wireless communication
– The radio frequency transceiver
• Interoperability
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Wireless Sensor Networks: Vision

• Ubiquitous connectivity
• “Smart” everything
• Incredibly cheap
• Last for years
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Wireless Can Change Everything

Adapted from K. Pister, UC Berkeley / Dust Networks

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Industrial Process Monitoring

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B90 Monitoring Network

• ~40 wireless sensor nodes

• Provide power meter and temperature data
• Adding ~40 nodes from Sensicast (separate network)

Dave Watson et al.

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Why Aren’t They Everywhere?

• Data reliability (% of data that gets to the server)
– Typical research grade network: ~80%
– Best in class: >99.9%
– Network stability, packet loss, etc
• Interoperability, ease of use
– No two major companies can talk
• Network lifetime
– Multi-year lifetime promised
– Several month lifetime often realized
• Poor market experiences
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Overview

• Wireless sensor networks

• The fundamentals
– Network lifetime
– Wireless networking
– Wireless communication
– The radio frequency transceiver
• Interoperability
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Battery Powered Nodes

• Virtually every node uses a battery

• Mains power is expensive & annoying
• Energy harvesting is vaporware
• Lifetime must be years
– Real cost is in labor to deploy, maintain
– Cost to replace 500 batteries each month?
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Energy in Wireless Sensor Networks

• Basic networks listen all the time (Zigbee, etc)

• 5 day lifetime with best in class AA batteries
Turn the radio off!
• 1% duty cycle gives 500 days
• But how do you know when to turn it on?
Much of WSN research has focused on energy
• How to make radios consume less power
• How to determine when to turn the radio on
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Overview

• Wireless sensor networks

• The fundamentals
– Network lifetime
– Wireless networking
– Wireless communication
– The radio frequency transceiver
• Interoperability
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The Network Stack

• The network stack is about abstraction

• Provide standard interfaces so you can work at
one layer without knowledge of everything else


Application Layer Application protocol (HTTP, FTP, etc)
Transport Layer Data reliability, flow control (TCP, UDP, etc)



Internet Layer Routing (IP)


Link Layer Medium access, data reliability, flow control
Physical Layer Bits in the air or on a wire

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Payload, Headers, & Packets

payload
header

Application Application
 
Transport Transport
 
Network Network
 
Link Link
 
Physical Physical
 
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Link Layer

• Often interchangeable with Medium Access

Control (MAC)
– When (or where) to send data
– Dealing with contention
– Low level addressing (hardware address)
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MAC: Aloha
• All devices at the same frequency all the time
• If you need to talk, send a packet, otherwise, listen
• Only works with extremely low traffic loads

• Two problems
– Radio is always on (poor lifetime)
– Collisions cause data loss
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MAC: Preamble Sampling

• Nodes sleep most of the time (radio off)
• Wake up to listen once in a while
• When they need to talk, they send a long preamble
• Nodes hear preamble, stay awake, get packet
• Contention is a problem
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MAC: Carrier Sense Multiple Access

• Carrier Sense Multiple Access is CSMA

– Listen to hear if the channel is busy
– If no, transmit your packet
– If yes, wait awhile and check again
• Designed for wired
– Everyone can hear everyone else
– What if they can’t all hear one another?
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Hidden Terminal In Wireless Networks

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MAC: Time Division Multiple Access

• Each node assigned a time to talk
– No contention
– Nodes must know when to wake up to listen
– Entire network must be time synchronized
– Frequency hopping is almost free
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Internet Layer

• Routing packets from source to destination

– Defines logical network connections
– Determines which physical links to use
• Wired networks have stable links
– Define a path from A to B and it will work later too
– Send a packet and it will most likely get there
• Wireless networks can have unstable links
– Links come and go over time
– Packet delivery rates on good links are low
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Network Topologies

Tree Network Topology

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Network Topologies

Mesh Network Topology

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Overview

• Wireless sensor networks

• The fundamentals
– Network Lifetime
– Wireless networking
– Wireless communication
– The radio frequency transceiver
• Interoperability
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Wireless Communication: 10km View

• B sends energy with information to A

– Environment, design determines the energy required
• A & B must speak the same basic language
– Carrier frequency
– Modulation (OOK, AM, FM, etc)
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How to Get Data From B to A

 Energy per bit 
Capacity  Bandwidth  log 2 1  Efficiency  
 Noise Energy 
Bits/second Hertz Modulation Signal to
(1/seconds) Constant (≤1) Noise Ratio
(Unitless) (Unitless)

• Enough energy must be received to decode data

• The modulation determines:

– The bandwidth
– The efficiency
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Signal Propagation

• Radio waves travel from B as an

electromagnetic wave
– Just like light, travels at 3x108 m/s
• EM wave is a sinusoid in both time, space

Distance, Time
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Signal Propagation: Free Space

• Transmitted power is spread over a sphere

• Power falls off with surface area
PTX
PRX  2
R
• Communication range up to 1km?
– Usually calculated using this theory
– Even outdoors this is far from a good estimate
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Signal Propagation: Indoors

• Radio waves bounce off and go through objects

• Interference occurs at receiver
• Unpredictable, geometry dependent
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Signal Propagation: Fading

½ wavelength
log(RF Power)

Distance from Wall

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Combating Fading
• Diversity in space or frequency
• Spatial diversity: multiple antennas
Antenna 1 Antenna 2

Watteyne, Lanzisera, Mehta, Pister, ICC 2010

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Combating Fading
• Diversity in space or frequency
• Spatial diversity: multiple antennas
• Frequency diversity
– Wideband modulation (WiFi, CDMA cellphones)
– Frequency hopping (Bluetooth)
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Fading and Diversity

ch.11 ch.12 ch.19 ch.20

ch.13 ch.14 ch.21 ch.22

Diversity improves performance

ch.15 ch.16 ch.23 ch.24

ch.17 ch.18 ch.25 ch.26

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Wireless Communication Key Points

• Communication range is not a sphere

• Lots of things cause this
– Multipath fading
• Diversity can help
– Space: multiple antennas
– Frequency: channel hopping
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Overview

• Wireless sensor networks

• The fundamentals
– Network lifetime
– Wireless networking
– Wireless communication
– The radio frequency transceiver
• Interoperability
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Radios of the World

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RF Transceivers

• Sensitivity better than 1pW (-90dBm) common

• Dynamic range of 109 to 1013 common
– Equal to or better than human hearing, eye sight
– Can see bright things or dim things but not both

Yet, we find that we can only communicate several

meters.
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Transceiver Design
Analog to
Baseband Low Noise
Digital Mixer
Filter Amplifier
Converter

Data
Synthesizer

Antenna
Digital to Baseband Mixer Power
Analog Filter Amplifier
Converter
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Power in Transceivers

• Large power overhead

– Dominates in low
power systems
• Non-ideal power amp
– Efficiency 15% - 50%
– 1W (30 dBm) out of antenna takes 5W out of battery!
• Low noise amplifier: ½ the noise = 4x the power
• Total power in TX and RX about the same in WSN
– PA changes this so that PTX >> PRX
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Silicon Implementation

4% Increase

Kluge, ISSCC 2006

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Things That Mess Up Communication

• Noise

• Interference Relative Noise Power

2.4 GHz
PHY Channels 11-26 5 MHz

2.4 GHz 2.4835 GHz

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Overview

• Wireless sensor networks

• The fundamentals
– Network lifetime
– Wireless networking
– Wireless communication
– The radio frequency transceiver
• Interoperability
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Interoperability

• Normally not all layers need to be the same

– Two computers can talk even if one is wireless and
one is wired
• But we want to buy a sensor node from A and
use it in a wireless network from B
– Need several layers to be the same
– Physical, link and network layers
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Interoperability

• Physical layer is standard (IEEE 802.15.4)

• Link layer is not standard
– Even the standard contains several choices
• Network layer is becoming standard (6loWPAN)
– Glue between link and network layer is not standard
• Devices continue to not work together
– Vendors trying to decide what to do
– But there is some hope…
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Summary

• We can provide reliable networking today

• Wireless communication is difficult
• What you use today will not be interoperable
• Not all networks created equal