Wireless Sensor Networks

Unit I / Overview of WSN

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 Syllabus / Unit - I
• Overview of WSN:
• Single-Node Architecture -
Hardware Components - Network
Characteristicsand
constraints - Unique challenges Enabling
Technologie - for Wireless
s
Types of wireless sensor
Sensor
networks. Networks
-

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 Topic 1

Introduction to WSN

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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.
• 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.
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• 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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• 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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 Motivation for WSN
• The recent developments engineering,
communication
in and networking led to new sensor
designs, information technologies and wireless
systems.
• Such advanced sensors can be used as a bridge
between the physical world and the digital world.
• Sensors are used in numerous devices, industries,
machines and help in avoiding infrastructure failures,
accidents, conserving natural resources, preserving
wildlife, increase productivity, provide security etc.
• The use of distributed sensor network contributed by
the technological advances in VLSI, MEMS and Wireless
Communication.
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• With the help of modern semiconductor
technology, powerful microprocessors can be
developed,
size when smaller in to the
compared generation
previous products. This miniaturization
of
computing and sensing technologies led toprocessing,
tiny,
low- power and cheap sensors, controllers and
actuators.

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 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 four
basic components. They are:
– Power Supply
– Sensor
– Processing Unit
– Communication System

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Fig 2 / Basic Components of WSN

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 Elements of WSN (Cont)
• The sensor collects the analog data from the physical
world and an ADC converts this data to digital data.
• The main processing unit a microprocessor or a
microcontroller, performs an intelligent data processing
and manipulation. Communication system consists of
radio system, a short-range radio for data transmission
and reception.
• As all the components are low-power devices, a small
battery like CR-2032, is used to power the entire
system.
• A Sensor Node consists of not only the
component
sensing but also otherimportant features like
processing, communication and storage units.
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• With these features, components and
all
enhancements, a Sensor Node is responsible for
physical world data collection, network analysis, data
correlation and fusion of data from other sensor with
its own data.

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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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 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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Fig 4 / Single Hop Architecture

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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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Fig 6 / Flat and Hierarchical Network
Architectures

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 Network Topologies in WSN
• A WSN can be either a single-hop network or a multi-
hop network. The following are a few different network
topologies that are used in WSNs.
• Star Topology
• In star topology, there is a single central node known as
hub or switch and every node in the network is
connected to this hub. Star topology is very easy to
implement, design and expand. The data flows through
the hub and plays an important role in the network and
a failure in the hub can result in failure of entire
network.

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• Tree Topology
• A tree topology is a hierarchical network where there is
a single root node at the top and this node is
connected to many nodes in the next level and
continues. The processing power and energy
consumption is highest at the root node and keeps on
decreasing as we go down the hierarchical order.

• Mesh Topology
• In mesh topology, apart from transmitting its own data,
each node also acts as a relay for transmitting data of
other connected nodes. Mesh topologies are further
divided into Fully Connected Mesh and Partially
Connected Mesh. In fully connected mesh topology,
each node is connected to every other node while in
partially connected mesh topology, a node is
connected one or more neighboring nodes.
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Fig 7 / Network Topologies in WSN

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 Applications of WSN
• Air Traffic Control (ATC)
• Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC)
• Industrial Assembly Line
• Automotive Sensors
• Battlefield Management and Surveillance
• Biomedical Applications
• Bridge and Highway Monitoring
• Disaster Management
• Earthquake Detection
• Electricity Load Management

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• Environment Control and Monitoring
• Industrial Automation
• Inventory Management
• Personal Health Care
• Security Systems

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 Topic 2

Single Node Architecture –

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 Introduction
• Building a wireless sensor network requires the
constituting nodes to be developed. These nodes have
to meet the requirements from a given application.
They have to be small, cheap, energy efficient,
equipped with the right sensors, memory resources
and sufficient communication facilities. The hardware
components of the functioning node are explained as
follows.

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 Overview of Sensor Node
• A basic sensor node comprises five main components
are shown in the Figure.
• Controller: To process all relevant data
• Memory: To store programs and intermediate data.
• Sensors and actuators: Actual interface to the physical
world to observe or control physical parameters of the
environment.
• Communication: Device for sending and receiving
information over a wireless channel
• Power supply: Some form of batteries necessary to
provide energy and some form of recharging by
obtaining energy from the environment as well.
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Fig 8 / Basic Components of a Sensor Node

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 Controllers
• The controller is the core of a wireless sensor node.
• It is the Central Processing Unit (CPU) of the node
• It collects data from sensors, processes this data,
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.
• Such a variety of processing tasks can be performed on
various controller architectures, representing trade-offs
between flexibility, performance, energy efficiency, and
costs.
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• Microcontrollers are suitable for WSNs since they can
reduce their power consumption by going into sleep
states where only parts of the controller are active.
• One of the main differences to general-purpose
systems is that microcontroller-based systems do not
include a memory management unit – for example,
protected or virtual memory is difficult.
• In a wireless sensor node, DSP can be used to process
incoming data. But the advantages of a DSP are not
required in a WSN node and they are usually not used.
• Another for the controller is to use Field-
option
Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) or
Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) Application-
microcontrollers. instead 30
• An FPGA can be reprogrammed in the field to adapt to
a changing set of requirements , but this can take time
and energy.
• An ASIC is a specialized processor, designed for a given
application such as high-speed routers and switches.
• The typical trade-off here is loss of flexibility in
return for a considerably better energy efficiency and
performance.

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 Memory
• There is a need for Random Access Memory (RAM) to
store intermediate sensor readings, packets from other
nodes etc.
• RAM is fast, but it loses its contents if power supply is
interrupted.
• The program code can be stored in Read-Only Memory
(ROM) or in Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-
Only Memory (EEPROM) or flash memory.
• Flash memory can also serve as intermediate storage of
data when the power supply goes off for some time.
• The long read and write access delays of flash memory
should be taken into account as well as the high
required energy.
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 Communication Module
1. Choice of transmission medium
• The first choice is the transmission medium and usual
choices include radio frequencies, optical
communication, and ultrasound.
• Radio Frequency (RF)-based communication is vital
requirement of most WSN applications.
• It provides 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. The
sensor networks use communication wireless
between about 433 MHz and 2.4 GHz. frequencies
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 2. Transceivers
• For actual communication, both a transmitter and a
receiver are required in a sensor node to convert a bit
stream coming from a microcontroller and convert them
to and from radio waves. Such combined devices are
called transceivers.
• Usually, half- operation is realized since
transmitting
duplex and receiving at the same time on a
wireless medium is impractical in most cases. A range of
low-cost transceivers is available that incorporate all the
circuitry required for transmitting and receiving,
modulation, demodulation, amplifiers, filters, mixers
etc..
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 3. Transceiver tasks and characteristics
• The following are the some of the important
characteristics of a transceiver which should be taken
into account.
– Service to upper layer
– Power Consumption and Energy Efficiency
– Carrier Frequency & Multiple channels
– Transmission Power Control
– Data Rates
– Modulation
– Noise Figure
– Power Efficiency
– Frequency Stability etc
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 4. Transceiver States
• Transmit State: The transmit part of the transceiver is
active and the antenna radiates energy.
• Receive State: The receive part is active.
• Idle State: A transceiver that is ready to receive but not
currently receiving anything is said to be in an idle
state.
• Sleep State: The significant parts of the transceiver are
switched off. There are transceivers offering several
different sleep states.

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 Sensors & Actuators
• Sensors can be categorized into the following three
categories -
1. Passive Omni-directional sensors:
• They can measure a physical quantity at the point of
the sensor node without manipulating the environment
by active probing. They obtain the energy directly from
the environment – energy is only needed to amplify
their analog signal. There is no notion of “direction in
these measurements. Typical examples include
thermometer, light sensors, vibration, microphones,
humidity, chemical sensors etc

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2.Passive narrow-beam sensors: They are passive 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.
3.Active sensors: They probe the environment, for
example, a sonar or radar sensor or some types of
seismic sensors, which generate shock waves by small
explosions.

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 Power Supply of Sensor Nodes
1. Traditional batteries
• The power source of a sensor node is a battery, either
non-rechargeable (primary batteries) or, if an energy
scavenging device is present on the node, also
rechargeable (secondary batteries).
• In some form or other, batteries are electro-chemical
stores for energy – the chemicals being the main
determining factor of battery technology.

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 2. Energy scavenging
• Some of the unconventional energy sources like fuel
cells, micro heat engines and radioactivity – convert
energy from stored secondary form into electricity in a
easy 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.
• The energy from a node’s environment must be tapped
into and made available to the node – energy
scavenging should take place.

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3. Photo-voltaics
The 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. The resulting
power ranges between 10 mW/cm2 indoors and 15
mW/cm2 outdoors. Single cells achieve a fairly stable
output voltage of about 0.6 V. Hence, solar cells are
used to recharge secondary batteries.
4. Temperature gradients
Differences in temperature can be directly converted to
electrical energy. Theoretically, even small difference
for example, 5 K can produce considerable power, but
practical devices fall very short of theoretical upper
limits.
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5. 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. The available energy depends on amplitude
and frequency of the vibration and ranges between 0.1
mW/cm3 and 10, 000 mW/cm3 for some extreme
cases.

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 Topic 3

Network Characteristics

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• The following are the characteristics of Wireless Sensor
Networks:
1. Type of service
• The service type provided by a conventional
communication network is to move bits from one place
to another.. A WSN is expected to provide meaningful
information and actions about a given task. The
concepts like scoping of interactions to specific
geographic regions or to time intervals are important.
Hence using such a network along with new interfaces
and new ways of thinking about the service of a
network are required.

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 2. Quality of Service
• The quality of service is closely related to the type of a
network’s service. The traditional quality of service
requirements coming from multimedia-type
applications like bounded delay or
bandwidth minimum irrelevant when
tolerant
are to latency applications
or the bandwidth
are of the transmitted
data.
• In some cases, the occasional delivery of a packet can
be more than enough and in other cases, very high
reliability requirements exist. In some other cases,
delay is important when actuators are to be controlled
in a real-time fashion by the sensor network. The
packet delivery ratio is an insufficient metric.
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• The vital requirement is the amount and quality of
information that can be extracted at given sinks about
the observed objects or area.
• Therefore, adapted quality concepts like reliable
detection of events or the approximation quality of a,
say, temperature map is important.

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 3. Fault tolerance
• The nodes may run out of energy or get damaged, or
even interrupt the wireless communication between
two nodes permanently. The redundant deployment is
necessary for WSN to tolerate the node failure and
using more number of nodes will be necessary even if
all nodes functioned correctly.
4. Lifetime
• In many cases, the nodes will have to depend on a
limited supply of energy using batteries. Replacing
these energy sources in the field is usually not
practicable and simultaneously, a WSN must operate at
least for a given mission time. Hence, the lifetime of a
WSN becomes a very important figure of merit. Hence
an energy-efficient way of operation of the WSN is
necessary. As an alternative to energy supplies, a
limited power source must also be available on a
sensor node. 47
• These sources are not powerful enough to ensure
continuous operation but can provide some recharging
of batteries.
• Under such conditions, the lifetime of the network
should ideally be infinite. The lifetime of a network also
has direct trade-offs against quality of service: investing
more energy can increase quality but decrease lifetime.
• The precise definition of lifetime depends on the
application. The simple option is to use the time until
the first node fails as the network lifetime. Other
options include the time until the network is
disconnected in two or more partitions, the time until
50 % of nodes have failed etc.
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 5. Scalability
• Since a WSN may include a large number of nodes,
the employed architectures and protocols must be
able scale to these numbers.
6. Wide range of densities
• In a WSN, the number of nodes per unit area that is
the density of the network can vary considerably.
Different applications will have very different node
densities. Even within a given application, density can
vary over time and space and density also does not
have to homogeneous in the entire and the network
should adapt to such variations.

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 7. Programmability
 The nodes need to process information and 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.
8. Maintainability
• WSN has to monitor its own health and status to
change operational parameters or to choose different
trade-offs. The network can also be able to interact
with external maintenance mechanisms to ensure its
extended operation at a required quality.

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 Topic 4

Challenges of WSN

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 Introduction
• To realize characteristics requirements, the
the
innovative mechanisms for a communication network
have to be found.
• The particular challenge is the need to find
mechanisms specific to the idiosyncrasies of a given
application to support the specific quality of service,
and maintainability requirements.
• These mechanisms also have to generalize to a wider
range of applications and implementation of a WSN
becomes necessary for every individual application.
• Some of the mechanisms that will form typical parts of
WSNs are:
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 1. Multi-hop Wireless Communication
• Since wireless communication is a core technique, a
direct communication between a sender and a receiver
is faced with limitations.
• In particular, communication over long distances is only
possible using high transmission power.
• The use of intermediate nodes as relays can reduce the
total required power.
• Hence, for many forms of WSNs, multi-hop
communication will be a necessary ingredient.

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 Energy Efficient Operation & Auto-configuration
• 2. Energy-efficient Operation: It is a key technique for
supporting long life time. The other options include
energy-efficient data transport between two nodes or
the energy-efficient determination of requested
information. The non-homogeneous energy
consumption – the forming of “hotspots” is an issue.
• 3. Auto-configuration: A WSN will have to configure
most of its operational parameters, independent of
external configuration. As an example, nodes should
be able to determine their geographical positions only
using other nodes of the network so- called “self-
location”. The network should be able to tolerate failing
nodes or to integrate new nodes.
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 4. Collaboration & 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 and only the joint data of
many sensors provides enough information.
• Information is processed in the network in various forms
to achieve this collaboration. This is opposite to having
every node transmit all data to an external network and
process it “at the edge” of the network.
• An example is to determine the highest or the average
temperature within an area and to report that value to a
sink. To solve such tasks, readings from individual sensors
can be aggregated reducing the amount of data to be
transmitted and hence improving the energy efficiency.
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 5. Data Centric
• Traditional communication are
around the transfer of data between centered
networks
devices, each equipped with one network twoaddress –
the operation of such networks is thus address-centric.
specific
• In a WSN, the nodes are deployed to protect against
node failures or to compensate for the low quality of a
single node’s actual sensing equipment. Hence,
switching from an address-centric paradigm to a data-
centric paradigm in designing architecture and
communication protocols is promising.
• An example for such a data-centric interaction will be
to request the average temperature in a given location
area, as opposed to requiring temperature readings
from individual nodes.
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 6. Locality
• The principle of locality will have to be embraced to
ensure in particular, scalability.
• Nodes with limited should attempt to limit the state
that they accumulate during protocol processing to
only information about their direct neighbors.
• This will allow the network to scale to large numbers of
nodes without having to depend on powerful
processing at each single node.

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