Wireless sensor network

"WSN" redirects here. For the metasyntax, see Wirth syntax notation.

Typical multi-hop wireless sensor network architecture

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of spatially distributed autonomous sensors to monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure, motion or pollutants., and to cooperatively pass their data through the network to a main location. The more modern networks are bi-directional, enabling also to control the activity of the sensors. The development of wireless sensor networks was motivated by military applications such as battlefield surveillance; today such networks are used in many industrial and consumer application, such as industrial process monitoring and control, machine health monitoring, environment and habitat monitoring, healthcare applications, home automation, and traffic control.

The WSN is built of "nodes" – from a few to several hundreds or even thousands, where each node is connected to one (or sometimes several) sensors. Each such sensor network node has typically several parts: a radio transceiver with an internal antenna or connection to an external antenna, a microcontroller, an electronic circuit for interfacing with the sensors and an energy source, usually a battery or an embedded form of energy harvesting. A sensor node might vary in size from that of a shoebox down to the size of a grain of dust, although functioning "motes" of genuine microscopic dimensions have yet to be created. The cost of sensor nodes is similarly variable, ranging from hundreds of dollars to a few pennies, depending on the complexity of the individual sensor nodes. Size and cost constraints on sensor nodes result in corresponding constraints on resources such as energy, memory, computational speed and communications bandwidth. The topology of the WSNs can vary from a simple star network to an advanced multi-hop wireless mesh network. The propagation technique between the hops of the network can be routing or flooding.

In computer science and telecommunications, wireless sensor networks are an active research area with numerous workshops and conferences arranged each year.

Applications

Area monitoring

Area monitoring is a common application of WSNs. In area monitoring, the WSN is deployed over a region where some phenomenon is to be monitored. A military example is the use of sensors to detect enemy intrusion; a civilian example is the geo-fencing of gas or oil pipelines.

When the sensors detect the event being monitored (heat, pressure), the event is reported to one of the base stations, which then takes appropriate action (e.g., send a message on the internet or to a satellite). Similarly, wireless sensor networks can use a range of sensors to detect the presence of vehicles ranging from motorcycles to train cars.

Environmental monitoring

A number of WSNs have been deployed for environmental monitoring.

Air pollution monitoring

Wireless sensor networks have been deployed in several cities (Stockholm, London or Brisbane) to monitor the concentration of dangerous gases for citizens. The sensor nodes can control important parameters like CO, CO2, NO2 or CH4, which are generated by vehicles and industry, and have a severe impact on the human health. This way, the public institutions have a good tool to design plans to reduce pollution, improve the air quality and ensure the compliance with current legislation.

Forest fires detection

A network of Sensor Nodes can be installed in a forest to control when a fire has started. The nodes will be equipped with sensors to control temperature, humidty and gases which are produced by fire in the trees or vegetation. The early detection is crucial for a successful action of the firefighters; thanks to Wireless Sensor Networks, the fire brigade will be able to know when a fire is started and how it is spreading.

Greenhouse monitoring

Wireless sensor networks are also used to control the temperature and humidity levels inside commercial greenhouses. When the temperature and humidity drops below specific levels, the greenhouse manager must be notified via e-mail or cell phone text message, or host systems can trigger misting systems, open vents, turn on fans, or control a wide variety of system responses.

Landslide detection

A landslide detection system, makes use of a wireless sensor network to detect the slight movements of soil and changes in various parameters that may occur before or during a landslide. And through the data gathered it may be possible to know the occurrence of landslides long before it actually happens.

Industrial monitoring

Machine health monitoring

Wireless sensor networks have been developed for machinery condition-based maintenance (CBM)as they offer significant cost savings and enable new functionalities. In wired systems, the installation of enough sensors is often limited by the cost of wiring. Previously inaccessible locations, rotating machinery, hazardous or restricted areas, and mobile assets can now be reached with wireless sensors.

Water/wastewater monitoring

There are many opportunities for using wireless sensor networks within the water/wastewater industries. Facilities not wired for power or data transmission can be monitored using industrial wireless I/O devices and sensors powered using solar panels or battery packs.

Landfill ground well level monitoring and pump counter

Wireless sensor networks can be used to measure and monitor the water levels within all ground wells in the landfill site and monitor leachate accumulation and removal. A wireless device and submersible pressure transmitter monitors the leachate level. The sensor information is wirelessly transmitted to a central data logging system to store the level data, perform calculations, or notify personnel when a service vehicle is needed at a specific well.

Agriculture

Using wireless sensor networks within the agricultural industry is increasingly common; using a wireless network frees the farmer from the maintenance of wiring in a difficult environment. Gravity feed water systems can be monitored using pressure transmitters to monitor water tank levels, pumps can be controlled using wireless I/O devices, and water use can be measured and wirelessly transmitted back to a central control center for billing. Irrigation automation enables more efficient water use and reduces waste.

Fleet monitoring

It is possible to put a node on-board of each vehicle of a fleet. The node gathers its position via the GPS module, and reports its coordinates so that the location is tracked in real-time. The nodes can be connected to temperature sensors to avoid any disruption of the cold chain, helping to ensure the safety of food, pharmaceutical and chemical shipments. In situations where there is not reliable GPS coverage, like inside buildings, garages and tunnels, using information from GSM cells is an alternative for to GPS localization.

Structural monitoring

Wireless sensors can be used to monitor the movement within building and infrastructure such as bridges, flyovers, embankments, tunnels etc... enabling Engineering practices to monitor assets remotely with out the need for costly site visits, as well as having the advantage of daily data, whereas traditional this date was collected weekly or monthly, involving either road or rail closure in some cases. it is also far more accurate than any visual inspection that would be carried out. site like www.moniteye.co.uk provide this type of service to engineering firms and similar. visit the website for further information on asset monitoring and wireless sensor networks.

Characteristics

The main characteristics of a WSN include:

• Power consumption constrains for nodes using batteries or energy harvesting
• Ability to cope with node failures
• Mobility of nodes
• Dynamic network topology
• Communication failures
• Heterogeneity of nodes
• Scalability to large scale of deployment
• Ability to withstand harsh environmental conditions
• Ease of use
• Unattended operation.

Sensor nodes can be imagined as small computers, extremely basic in terms of their interfaces and their components. They usually consist of a processing unit with limited computational power and limited memory, sensors or MEMS (including specific conditioning circuitry), a communication device (usually radio transceivers or alternatively optical), and a power source usually in the form of a battery. Other possible inclusions are energy harvesting modules, secondary ASICs, and possibly secondary communication devices (e.g. RS-232 or USB).

The base stations are one or more distinguished components of the WSN with much more computational, energy and communication resources. They act as a gateway between sensor nodes and the end user as they typically forward data from the WSN on to a server. Other special components in routing based networks are routers, designed to compute, calculate and distribute the routing tables. Many techniques are used to connect to the outside world including mobile phone networks, satellite phones, radio modems, high power WiFi links etc.

Platforms

Standards and specifications

Several standards are currently either ratified or under development for wireless sensor networks. There are a number of standardization bodies in the field of WSNs. The IEEE focuses on the physical and MAC layers; the Internet Engineering Task Force works on layers 3 and above. In addition to these, bodies such as the International Society of Automation provide vertical solutions, covering all protocol layer. Finally, there are also several non-standard, proprietary mechanisms and specifications.

Standards are used far less in WSNs than in other computing systems. However predominant standards commonly used in WSN communications include:

• WirelessHART
• ISA100
• IEEE 1451
• ZigBee / 802.15.4
• IEEE 802.11

Hardware

Main article: sensor node

The main challenge in a WSN is to produce low cost and tiny sensor nodes. There are an increasing number of small companies producing WSN hardware and the commercial situation can be compared to home computing in the 1970s. Many of the nodes are still in the research and development stage, particularly their software. Also inherent to sensor network adoption is the use very low power method for data acquisition.

Software

Energy is the scarcest resource of WSN nodes, and it determines the lifetime of WSNs. WSNs are meant to be deployed in large numbers in various environments, including remote and hostile regions, with ad-hoc communications as key. For this reason, algorithms and protocols need to address the following issues:

• Lifetime maximization
• Robustness and fault tolerance
• Self-configuration

Some of the important topics in WSN software research are:

• Operating systems
• Security
• Mobility
• Usability – human interface for deployment and management, debugging and end-user control
• Middleware – the design of middle-level primitives between high level software and the systems

Operating systems

Operating systems for wireless sensor network nodes are typically less complex than general-purpose operating systems. They more strongly resemble embedded systems, for two reasons. First, wireless sensor networks are typically deployed with a particular application in mind, rather than as a general platform. Second, a need for low costs and low power leads most wireless sensor nodes to have low-power microcontrollers ensuring that mechanisms such as virtual memory either unnecessary or too expensive to implement.

It is therefore possible to use embedded operating systems such as eCos or uC/OS for sensor networks. However, such operating systems are often designed with real-time properties.

TinyOS is perhaps the first operating system specifically designed for wireless sensor networks. TinyOS is based on an event-driven programming model instead of multithreading. TinyOS programs are composed into event handlers and tasks with run to completion-semantics. When an external event occurs, such as an incoming data packet or a sensor reading, TinyOS signals the appropriate event handler to handle the event. Event handlers can post tasks that are scheduled by the TinyOS kernel some time later.

LiteOS is a newly developed OS for wireless sensor networks, which provides UNIX like abstraction and support for C programming language. Contiki is an OS which uses a simpler programming style in C while providing advances such as 6LoWPAN and proto-threads.

Algorithms

The algorithmic approach to modelling, simulating and analyzing WSNs differentiates itself from the protocol approach by the fact that the idealised mathematical models used are more general and easier to analyze. However, they are sometimes less realistic than the models used for protocol design, since an algorithmic approach often neglects timing issues, protocol overhead, the routing initiation phase and sometimes distributed implementation of the algorithms.

Simulation of WSNs

In general, there are two ways to develop simulations of WSNs. Either use a custom platform to develop the simulation. And the second option is to develop one's own simulation:

Simulators

There are network simulator platforms specifically designed to model and simulate Wireless Sensor Networks, like TOSSIM, which is a part of TinyOS and COOJA which is a part of Contiki. Traditional network simulators like ns-2 have also been used. Ns-3, which is an upgrade over Ns-2 is expected to be released shortly, also features WSN libraries. However in reply to a question at his keynote address in Spring Simulation Multiconference 2010, Orlando, FL, George Riley from the NS team mentioned that even NS-3 simulator does not have any capabilities to model and simulate complex environments.

As such, at present Agent-based Modeling and Simulation is the only paradigm which allows the simulation of even complex behavior in the environments of Wireless sensors (such as flocking).

Network Simulators like QualNet, OPNET Modeler, NetSim and NS2 can be used to simulate Wireless Sensor Network. Other simulators, like IDEA1 – based on SystemC – have hardware-level librairies that permits system-level simulations by taking low-level constraints into account.

Based on Matlab, the Prowler (Probabilistic Wireless Network Simulator) toolbox is available.

Agent-based simulation of WSN

Agent-based simulation of wireless sensor and ad-hoc networks is a relatively newer paradigm. ABM was originally based on social simulation. A recent article on agent-based simulation published in the IEEE Communications magazine gives examples and tutorials on how to develop custom agent-based simulation models for wireless sensors, mobile robots and P2P networks in a short period of time (few hours). A formal agent-based simulation framework using formal specification using Z notation demonstrating the use of agent-based modeling to represent simulation of complex behavior in the environment of sensors is given in.

Other concepts

Distributed sensor network

If a centralised architecture is used in a sensor network and the central node fails, then the entire network will collapse, however the reliability of the sensor network can be increased by using distributed architecture.
Distributed architecture is used in WSNs for the following reasons:

1. Sensor nodes are prone to failure,
2. For better collection of data
3. To provide nodes with backup in case of failure of the central node

We also take care of nodes sensing redundant information and forwarding the data that is of no use. There is also no centralised body to allocate the resources and they have to be self organised.

Data visualization

The data gathered from wireless sensor networks is usually saved in the form of numerical data in a central base station. Additionally, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is specifying standards for interoperability interfaces and metadata encodings that enable real time integration of heterogeneous sensor webs into the Internet, allowing any individual to monitor or control Wireless Sensor Networks through a Web Browser.

Information fusion

In wireless sensor networks, information fusion, also called data fusion, has been developed for processing sensor data by filtering, aggregating, and making inferences about the gathered data. Information fusion deals with the combination of multiple sources to obtain improved information: cheaper, greater quality or greater relevance. Within the wireless sensor networks domain, simple aggregation techniques such as maximum, minimum, and average, have been developed for reducing the overall data traffic to save energy.