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NODE ARCHITECTURE
AND NETWORK
ARCHITECTURE
Jothibasu M
AP(Sl.Gr) / Dept of ECE
PSGiTech

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 Introduction
•A Sensor is a device used to gather information about a physical process and
translate into electrical signals that can be processed, measured and analyzed.

• The physical process can be any real-world information like temperature,

pressure, light, sound, motion, position, flow, humidity, radiation etc.

•A Sensor Network is a structure consisting of sensors, computational units and

communication elements for the purpose of recording, observing and reacting
to an event or a phenomenon.

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 Introduction

•• The events can like physical world, an industrial environment, a biological

system while the controlling or observing body can be a consumer application,
government, civil, military, or an industrial entity

• Such Sensor Networks can be used for remote sensing, medical telemetry,
surveillance, monitoring, data collection etc.

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 Wireless Sensor Networks
•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.

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 Wireless Sensor Networks
• According to technologists, Wireless Sensor Networks 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, deployed in a wide area and interconnected through
wireless links for various civilian and military applications.

•A Wireless Sensor Network consists of Sensor Nodes deployed in large

quantities and support sensing, data processing, embedded computing
and connectivity

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 Wireless Sensor Networks
• Elements of WSN
•A typical wireless sensor network can be divided into two elements. They
are:
• – Sensor Node
• – Network Architecture

A Sensor Node in a WSN consists of five basic components. They are:

• – Power Supply
• – Sensor
• – Processing Unit
• - Memory
• – Communication System

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Wireless Sensor Networks

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 Network Architecture
• When a large number of sensor nodes are deployed in a large area to monitor a
physical environment, the networking of these sensor nodes is equally
important.

•A sensor node in a WSN not only communicates with other sensor nodes but
also with a Base Station (BS) using wireless communication.

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• The base station sends commands to the sensor nodes and the sensor node
perform the task by collaborating with each other.

• The sensor nodes in turn send the data back to the base station.

• A base station also acts as a gateway to other networks through the internet

• After receiving the data from the sensor nodes, a base station performs simple
data processing and sends the updated information to the user using internet.

• If each sensor node is connected to the base station, it is known as Single-hop

network architecture.

• Although long distance transmission is possible, the energy consumption for

communication will be significantly higher than data collection and
computation.

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 Multi-hop Architecture
• Hence, Multi-hop network architecture is usually used.
• Instead of one single link between the sensor node and the base
station, the data is transmitted through one or more intermediate
node

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• This can be implemented in two ways.

• Flat network architecture and Hierarchical network architecture.

• In flat architecture, the base station sends commands to all the sensor nodes
but the sensor node with matching query will respond using its peer nodes via
a multi-hop path.

• In hierarchical architecture, a group of sensor nodes are formed as a cluster

and the sensor nodes transmit data to corresponding cluster heads. • The
cluster heads can then relay the data to the base station

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 SINGLE-NODE ARCHITECTURE

HARDWARE COMPONENTS:

✔ Choosing the hardware components for a wireless sensor node has to

consider size, costs, and energy consumption of the nodes.

✔ A basic sensor node contains five main components such as Controller,

Memory, Sensors and Actuators, Communication devices and Power
supply Unit.

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Sensor node Hardware components
 Controller:

✔ The controller is the core of a wireless sensor node, it process all the
relevant data, capable of executing arbitrary code.

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

✔ It has to execute various programs, hence it is the Central

Processing Unit (CPU) of the node.

✔ For General-purpose processors applications microcontrollers are

used.

✔ These are highly overpowered, and their energy consumption is

excessive.
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✔ These are used in embedded systems.
 Controller: cntd….
✔ The characteristics of microcontrollers are best suited to
embedded systems and have flexibility in connecting with sensors
because they have memory built in.

✔ A Programmable Digital Signal Processor (P-DSP) is a

specialized Microprocessors with its architecture optimized for the
operational needs of Digital Signal Processor.

✔ The goal of DSPs is usually to measure, filter and/or compress

continuous real-world analog signals.

✔ In a wireless sensor node, such a DSP could be used to process

data coming from a simple analog wireless communication
device to extract a digital data stream.

✔ In broadband wireless communication, DSPs are an

appropriate and successfully used platform
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 Controller: cntd….

✔ An Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) can be

reprogrammed “in the field” to adapt to a changing set of
requirements, this can take time and energy.

✔ An Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) is a specialized

processor, custom designed for a given application only.

✔ ASIC has a specialized testing methods, so it may increase cost

and effort.

Examples: Intel Strong ARM, Texas Instruments MSP 430, Atmel

ATmega.

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 Memory:
✔ Memory is required to store programs and intermediate data; usually,
different types of memory are used for programs and data.
✔ In WSN there is a need for Random Access Memory (RAM) to store
intermediate sensor readings, packets from other nodes, and so on.
✔ RAM is fast, its main disadvantage is that it loses its content if power
supply is interrupted.
✔ Program code can be stored in Read-Only Memory (ROM) or in
Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory (EEPROM) or
flash memory.
✔ Flash memory is similar to EEPROM but allowing data to be erased or
written in blocks instead of only a byte at a time.

✔ It can also serve as intermediate storage of data in case RAM is

insufficient or the power supply of RAM should be shut down.
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 Sensors and actuators:

✔ The actual interface to the physical world: The devices that can
observe or control physical parameters of the environment.

✔ Sensors can be roughly categorized into three categories as

☞ 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.

☞ Passive narrow-beam sensors: These sensors are passive as well, but

have a well-defined notion/idea of direction of measurement.

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 Sensors and actuators:

☞ Active sensors: These actively analyses the environment. For example,

a radar sensor or some types of seismic sensors, which generate
shock waves by small explosions.

✔ Actuators:

✔ Actuators are just about as diverse as sensors, yet for the purposes of
designing a WSN that converts electrical signals into physical
phenomenon.

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 Communication Device:

✔ To turn nodes into a network a device is required for sending and

receiving information over a wireless channel.

Transmission medium selection:

✔ 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 networks.

✔ The case of wireless communication is considerably more interesting

because it include radio frequencies.

✔ Radio Frequency (RF)-based communication is by far the most relevant

one as it best fits the requirements of most WSN applications.
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 Communication Device: …cntd
Transceivers:

✔ For Communication, both transmitter and receiver are required in a

sensor node to convert a bit stream coming from a microcontroller and
convert them to and from radio waves.

✔ For two tasks a combined device called transceiver is used.

✔ Transceiver structure has two parts as Radio Frequency (RF) front end
and the baseband part.

❖ The radio frequency front end performs analog signal processing in

the actual radio frequency Band.

❖ The baseband processor performs all signal processing in the digital

domain and communicates with a sensor node’s processor or other
digital circuitry.
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 Communication Device: …cntd
Transceivers: RF Front end structure
▪ The Power Amplifier (PA) accepts signals from the IF or baseband part and
amplifies them for transmission over the antenna.

▪ 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.

RF Front end 24

structure
 Communication Device: …cntd

Transceiver tasks and characteristics:

▪ Service to upper layer: A receiver has to offer certain services to the upper
layers, mostly to the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer.

▪ Sometimes, this service is packet oriented or a transceiver only provides a

byte interface or even only a bit interface to the microcontroller.

▪ Power consumption and energy efficiency: The energy required to transmit and
receive a single bit.

▪ Carrier frequency and multiple channels:

▪ State change times and energy: A transceiver can operate in different modes as
sending or receiving, use different channels, or be in different power-safe
states. 25
 Communication Device: …cntd

Transceiver tasks and characteristics:

▪ 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.

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 Communication Device: …cntd

Transceiver tasks and characteristics:

▪ 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
bit/packet error rate.

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 Communication Device: …cntd

Transceiver tasks and characteristics:

▪ Range: The range is considered in absence of interference; it evidently

depends on the maximum transmission power, on the antenna
characteristics.

▪ 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.

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 Communication Device: …cntd
Transceiver tasks and characteristics:

▪ Carrier sense and RSSI: In MAC protocols, sensing through wireless

channel, the carrier, is busy that another node is transmitting then the
signal strength at which an incoming data packet has been received
can provide in the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI).

▪ Frequency stability: The degree of variation from minimal center

frequencies when environmental conditions of oscillators like
temperature or pressure change.

▪ Voltage range: Transceivers should operate reliably over a range of

supply voltages.

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 Power supply:

✔ As usually no tied power supply is available, some form of batteries are

necessary to provide energy.

✔ Sometimes, some form of recharging by obtaining energy from the

environment is available as well (e.g. solar cells).

✔ There are essentially two features:

1. Storing energy 2. Energy scavenging

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 Power supply:
☞ Traditional batteries: The power source of a sensor node is a battery, either
non-rechargeable(primary) or rechargeable(secondary).

☞ Upon these batteries the requirements are

• Capacity

• Capacity under load

• Self-discharge

• Efficient recharging

• Relaxation

• DC–DC Conversion: Unfortunately, batteries alone are not sufficient as a direct power
source for a sensor node. A DC – DC converter can be used to overcome this problem by
regulating the voltage delivered to the node’s circuitry
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 Power supply: …..cntd
Energy scavenging:
▪ Depending on application, high capacity batteries that last for long times
with negligible self-discharge rate, and that can efficiently provide small
amounts of current.

▪ For this energy scavenging is used which is the process of recharging the
battery with energy gathered from the environment like solar cells or
vibration-based power generation.

✔ Photovoltaics: The well-known solar cells can be used to power sensor

nodes. Temperature gradients: Differences in temperature can be directly
converted to electrical energy.

✔ Vibrations: General form of mechanical energy is vibrations.

✔ Flow of air/liquid: Another often-used power source is the flow of air or

liquid in wind mills or turbines. The challenge here is again the
miniaturization, but some of the work on millimeter scale MEMS gas
turbines might be reusable. 33
 ENERGY CONSUMPTION OF SENSOR NODES:

✔ Energy is supplied to a sensor node through batteries(have small capacity) and

recharging by energy scavenging(complicated and volatile).

✔ Hence, the energy consumption of a sensor node must be tightly controlled.

✔ The main consumers of energy are the controller, the radio front ends, the
memory, and type of the sensors.

✔ There are two methods to reduce power consumption of these components:

1. Designing low-power chips is efficient for sensor nodes. But the limitation
is the benefit gained by such designs can easily be wasted when the components
are improperly operated.

2. Reduced functionality by using multiple states of operation with reduced

energy consumption.

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 ENERGY CONSUMPTION OF SENSOR NODES: …..cntd

Microcontroller energy consumption:

❖ For a controller, typical states are “active”, “idle”, and “sleep”.

▪ The energy saving in microcontroller is denoted given by

Esaved =(tevent − t1)Pactive − (τdown (Pactive + Psleep)/2 +(tevent − t1 − τdown )Psleep)

▪ The energy overhead is denoted by Eoverhead = τUp (Pactive + Psleep)/2

Examples:

Intel StrongARM:

✔ In normal mode the power consumption is up to 400 mW.

✔ In idle mode the power consumption is up to 100 mW.
✔ In sleep mode the power consumption is up to 50 μW.
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 ENERGY CONSUMPTION OF SENSOR NODES: …..cntd

Texas Instruments MSP 430:

✔ In fully operational mode it consumes 1.2 mW

✔ In the deepest sleep mode(LPM4) only consumes 0.3 μW.
✔ In the next 3 higher modes consumes only 6 μW.

Atmel Atmega

✔ In Atmel ATmega power consumption varies between 6 mW and 15 mW in idle

and active modes and is about 75 μW in power-down modes.

Note: Power is energy divided by time. Often units of J/s (joules/second). Gives as Watts.

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 ENERGY CONSUMPTION OF SENSOR NODES: …..cntd

Memory energy consumption:

✔ The most relevant kinds of memory are on-chip memory and FLASH
memory.

✔ Off-chip RAM is rarely used. In fact, the power needed to drive on-chip
memory is usually included in the power consumption numbers given for the
controllers.

✔ Hence, the most relevant part is FLASH memory. Energy consumption

necessary for reading and writing to the Flash memory is used on the Mica
nodes.

✔ Hence, writing to FLASH memory can be a time- and energy-consuming task

that is best avoided if somehow possible.

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 ENERGY CONSUMPTION OF SENSOR NODES: …..cntd

❖ Radio transceivers energy consumption:

✔ A radio transceiver has essentially two tasks as transmitting and receiving

data between a pair of nodes.

✔ To maintain low energy consumption, the transceivers should be turned off

most of the time and only be activated when Necessary.

✔ The energy consumed by a transmitter is due to RF signal generation

(depends on Modulation & target distance) and due to electronic components
necessary for frequency synthesis, frequency conversion, filters, and so on.

✔ Similar to the transmitter, the receiver can be either turned off or turned
on.

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 ENERGY CONSUMPTION OF SENSOR NODES: …..cntd

Power consumption of sensor and actuators:

✔ Providing guidelines about the power consumption of the actual sensors
and actuators is impossible because of the wide variety of these devices.

✔ For example, passive light or temperature sensors – the power

consumption can possibly be ignored in comparison to other devices on a
wireless node.

✔ For other active devices like sonar (A measuring instrument that sends
out an acoustic pulse in water and measures distances in terms of time
for the echo of the pulse to return), power consumption can be quite
considerable in the dimensioning of power sources on the sensor node,
not to overstress batteries.

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 OPERATING SYSTEMS AND EXECUTION ENVIRONMENTS:

❖ Embedded operating systems:

✔ An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer

hardware and software resources i.e acts as an intermediary between
programs and the computer hardware.

✔ An embedded system is some combination of computer hardware and

software, either fixed in capability or programmable, that is
specifically designed for a particular function.

✔ Embedded operating systems (EOS) are designed to be used in

embedded computer systems.

✔ EOS are able to operate with a limited number of resources.

✔ They are very compact and extremely efficient by design 40

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 OPERATING SYSTEMS AND EXECUTION ENVIRONMENTS:

TinyOS:

✔ TinyOS is an open-source, flexible and Application-Specific

Operating System for wireless sensor networks.

✔ WSN consists of a large number of tiny and low-power nodes, each

of which executes simultaneous and reactive programs that must
work with strict memory and power constraints.

✔ TinyOS meets these challenges and has become the platform of

choice for sensor network such as limited resources and low-power
operation.

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 OPERATING SYSTEMS AND EXECUTION ENVIRONMENTS:

❖ TinyOS:

✔ Salient features of TinyOS are

▪ Has Event-based concurrency model
▪ Component-based architecture.
▪ TinyOS’s component library includes network protocols,
distributed services, sensor drivers, and data acquisition tools.
▪ TinyOS’s event-driven execution model

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 OPERATING SYSTEMS AND EXECUTION ENVIRONMENTS:
❖ Programming paradigms and application programming
interfaces:

Concurrent Programming:
✔ Concurrent processing is a computing model in
which multiple processors execute instructions
simultaneously for better performance.

✔ Concurrent means something that happens at the

same time as something else.

✔ Tasks are broken down into subtasks that are then

assigned to separate processors to perform
simultaneously, instead of sequentially as they
would have to be carried out by a single processor.

✔ Concurrent processing is sometimes said to be

synonymous with parallel processing.
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 Process-based concurrency:
✔ Most modern, general-purpose operating systems
support concurrent (seemingly parallel) execution of
multiple processes on a single CPU.

✔ Using processes you are forced to deal with

communication through messages, which is the
Erlang(A unit of traffic intensity in telephone system)
way of doing communication.

✔ Data is not shared, so there is no risk of data

corruption.

✔ Fault-tolerance and scalability is the main advantages

of using processes vs. threads. Another advantage of
processes is that they can crash and you are perfectly
ok with that, because you just restart them (even
across network hosts). If thread crashes, it may crash
the entire process, which may bring down your entire
application

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 Event-based programming:

✔ In computer programming, event-driven programming is a programming paradigm in

which the flow of the program is determined by events such as user actions (mouse
clicks, key presses), sensor outputs, or messages from other programs/threads.

✔ Event-driven programming is the dominant paradigm used in Graphical User

Interfaces (GUI-type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic
devices through graphical icons) and other applications.

✔ The system essentially waits for any event to happen, where an event typically can be
the availability of data from a sensor, the arrival of a packet, or the expiration of a
timer.

✔ Such an event is then handled by a short sequence of instructions that only stores the
fact that this event has occurred and stores the necessary information

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