Wireless Sensor Network Essay

1346 Words3 Pages

A wireless sensor network is a wireless network consisting of spatially distributed autonomous devices using sensors.They have the ability to monitor the physical as well as the environmental conditions.It is being widely adopted as a promising solution to numerous numbers of challenges which are being faced today. Sensor nodes, also known as motes, not only have limited amount of storage as well as processing capability which is a severe problem but also another constraint is the limited amount of energy of these sensor nodes. Dissipation of the nodes energy poses very critical issueas the lifetime of the node is limited by its battery capacity inwireless sensor network.

1.1 The configuration of wireless sensor networks

A wireless sensor …show more content…

Even if a large number of low-power sensor nodes aredeveloped, each deployed nodes have limited information processing capability and also have limited storage capability.Thus they have relatively short distance for communication.But on the other hand, the sink node is free from such shortcomings. As compared to sensor nodes, the sink nodes have larger capacity, a power supply that can be sustained for much longer time, a longer central processing unit (CPU) and also larger memory devices. Also, a sink node can connect itself to another sink node, depending on the need of the user's, or it can also connect itself to a wired connection, such as the internet, which has infrastructure …show more content…

First, considering the high density of nodes, the routing protocols should route data over long distances, irrespective of the network structure and size of the network. Some of the active nodes may fail during network operations due to depletion of the energy of sensor nodes or hardware breakdowns or various environmental factors, but these issues need not interrupt the normal operation of the network. Also as the sensor nodes have limited amount of power supply, limited processing capability, with limited memory and available bandwidth, need arises for efficient routing and data dissemination such that the network resources are utilized effectively. Furthermore, as the performance demands of wireless sensor networks are wholly application dependent, routing algorithms should satisfy the QoS demands of the application for which the network is being deployed. For example, challenges in designing the routing algorithms for environment monitoring will be different from issues that should be considered for target tracking or health care monitoring. Based on the differences between traditional wireless networks and the wireless sensor networks, various routing protocols have been proposed over the past few years, to address the challenges faced while routing the data packets in the wireless

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