SHRI VISHNU ENGINEERING COLLEGE FOR WOMEN

(A)
Name of the Subject: Wireless Sensor Networks Subject Code : UGEC8T08

Year / Semester : IV/ II

UNIT I OVER VIEW OF WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Introduction, Back ground of sensor networks, Key definitions of sensor

networks, Advantages of sensor networks, Unique constraints, Challenges
a n d A p p l i c a t i o n s o f Wi r e l e s s s e n s o r n e t w o r k s , C o l l a b o r a t i v e P r o c e s s i n g .

INTRODUCTION:

A sensor network is an infrastructure comprised of sensing (measuring), computing, and

communication elements that gives an administrator the ability to instrument, observe, and react to
events and phenomena in a specified environment.
There are four basic components in a sensor network:
(1) An assembly of distributed or localized sensors
(2) An interconnecting network (usually, but not always, wireless-based)
(3) a central point of information clustering; and
(4) a set of computing resources at the central point (or beyond) to handle data
Correlation, event trending, status querying, and data mining.
Because of the potentially large quantity of data collected, algorithmic methods for Data
Management play an important role in sensor networks.
The computation and communication infrastructure associated with sensor networks is often
specific to this environment and rooted in the device and application-based nature of these
networks.
Back ground of sensor networks:
Wireless sensor networking is envisioned as an economically viable paradigm and a promising
technology because of its ability to provide a variety of services, such as intrusion detection,
weather monitoring, security, tactical surveillance, and disaster management.
The services provided by WSNs are based on collaboration among small energy-constrained sensor
nodes.
 The large deployment of WSNs and the need for energy efficient strategy necessitate efficient
organization of the network topology for the purpose of balancing the load and prolonging the
network lifetime.
Research on WSNs have been focused on many research efforts and emerged as an important new
area in wireless technology.

Typical multi-hop wireless sensor network architecture

Wireless sensor networks (WSN), sometimes called wireless sensor and Actuator networks (WSAN)
are spatially distributed autonomous sensors to monitor physical or environmental conditions, such
as temperature, sound, pressure, etc. and to cooperatively pass their data through the network to a
main location.
Researchers see WSNs as an
o exciting emerging domain of deeply networked systems of
o low-power wireless motes
o with a tiny amount of CPU and memory, and
o large federated networks for high-resolution sensing of the environment
Sensors in a WSN have a variety of purposes, functions, and capabilities.

The field is now advancing under the push of recent technological advances and the pull of a myriad
of potential applications.
 The radar networks used in air traffic control, the national electrical power grid, and National wide
weather stations deployed over a regular topographic mesh are all examples of early-deployment
sensor networks.
All of these systems, however, use specialized computers and communication protocols and
consequently, are very expensive.
Much less expensive WSNs are now being planned for novel applications in physical security,
healthcare, and commerce.
Sensor networking is a multidisciplinary area that involves:
o Radio and Networking,
o Signal Processing,
o Artificial Intelligence,
o Database management,
o Systems architectures for operator-friendly infrastructure administration,
o Resource optimization,
o Power management algorithms, and
o Platform Technology (hardware and software, such as operating systems)
The technology for sensing and control includes
o Radio-wave frequency sensors;
o Electric and Magnetic field sensors;
o Optical-, Electro optic-, and Infrared sensors;
o Radars;
o Lasers;
o Location / Navigation sensors;
o Seismic and Pressure-wave sensors;
o Environmental parameter sensors (wind, humidity, heat);
o Biochemical national securityoriented sensors.
Sensor devices, or wireless nodes (WNs), are also (sometimes) called motes.
Sensors are typically deployed in a high-density manner and in large quantities
A WSN consists of densely distributed nodes that support sensing, signal processing, embedded
computing, and connectivity
Sensors are logically linked by self organizing

WNs typically transmit information to collecting (monitoring) stations that aggregate some or all of
the information.

WSNs have unique characteristics, such as, but not limited to, power constraints and limited battery
life for the WNs, redundant data acquisition, low duty cycle, and, many-to-one flows.

A current research and development (R&D) challenge is to develop low-power communication with
low-cost on-node processing and self organizing connectivity or protocols.

Another critical challenge is the need for extended temporal operation of the sensing node despite a
(typically) limited power supply (and/or battery life).
 Low power consumption is a key factor in ensuring long operating horizons for non-power-fed
systems (some systems can indeed be power-fed and/or rely on other power sources).

Power efficiency in WSNs is generally accomplished in three ways:

o Low-duty-cycle operation.

o Local/in-network processing to reduce data volume (and hence transmission time).

o Multihop networking reduces the requirement for long-range transmission since signal path loss is an
inverse exponent with range or distance.

o Each node in the sensor network can act as a repeater, thereby reducing the link range in turn, the
transmission power

ADVANTAGES OF SENSOR NETWORKS:

Dense networks of distributed communicating sensors can improve signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by
reducing average distances from sensor to source of signal, or target.
Increased energy efficiency in communications is enabled by the multihop topology of the network.
The greatest advantages of networked sensing are in improved robustness and scalability.
Additional relevant information from other sensors can be aggregated during this multihop
transmission through in-network processing.
ENERGY ADVANTAGE
Because of the unique attenuation characteristics of radio-frequency (RF) signals, a multihop RF
network provides a significant energy saving over a single-hop network for the same distanc
Consider an N-hop network

Assume the overall distance for transmission is Nr, where r is the one-hop distance.
The minimum receiving power at a node for a given transmission error rate is Preceive, and the power

at a transmission node is Psend

Then, the RF attenuation model near the ground is given by

where r is the transmission distance and is the RF attenuation exponent. Due to multipath and other
interference effects, is typically in the range of 2 to 5.

Therefore, the power advantage of an N-hop transmission versus a single-hop transmission over the
same distance Nr is
 The power advantage of using a multihop RF communication over a distance of Nr.

Figure illustrates the power attenuation for the multihop and single-hop networks.
A larger N gives a larger power saving due to the consideration of RF energy alone. However, this
analysis ignores the power usage by other components of an RF circuitry.

DETECTION ADVANTAGE

Each sensor has a finite sensing range, determined by the noise floor at the sensor.
A denser sensor field improves the odds of detecting a signal source within the range.
Once a signal source is inside the sensing range of a sensor, further increasing the sensor density
decreases the average distance from a sensor to the signal source, hence improving the signal-to-
noise ratio (SNR)
Let us consider the acoustic sensing case in a two-dimensional plane, where the acoustic power
received at a distance r is

which assumes an inverse distance squared attenuation. The SNR is given by

 Therefore, an increase in sensor density by a factor of k improves the SNR at a sensor by 10 log k
db.

KEY DEFINITIONS OF SENSOR NETWORKS:

Sensor: A transducer that converts a physical phenomenon such as heat, light, sound, or motion into
electrical or other signals that may be further manipulated by other apparatus.

Sensor node: A basic unit in a sensor network, with on-board sensors, processor, memory, wireless
modem, and power supply. It is often abbreviated as node. When a node has only a single sensor on board,
the node is sometimes also referred to as a sensor, creating some confusion.

Network topology: A connectivity graph where nodes are sensor nodes and edges are communication
links. In a wireless network, the link represents a one-hop connection, and the neighbors of a node are those
within the radio range of the node.

Routing: The process of determining a network path from a packet source node to its destination.

Date-centric: Approaches that name, route, or access a piece of data via properties, such as physical
location, that are external to a communication network. This is to be contrasted with address centric
approaches which use logical properties of nodes related to the network structure.

Geographic routing: Routing of data based on geographical attributes such as locations or regions. This
is an example of datecentric networking.

In-network: A style of processing in which the data is processed and combined near where the data is
generated.
 State: A snapshot about a physical environment (e.g., the number of signal sources, their locations or
spatial extent, speed of movement), or a snapshot of the system itself (e.g.,the network state).

Uncertainty: A condition of the information caused by noise in sensor measurements, or lack of

knowledge in models. The uncertainty affects the systems ability to estimate the state accurately and must
be carefully modeled. Because of the ubiquity of uncertainty in the data, many sensor network estimation
problems are cast in a statistical framework. For example, one may use a covariance matrix to characterize
the uncertainty in a Gaussian-like process or more general probability distributions for non-Gaussian
processes.

Task: Either high-level system tasks which may include sensing, communication, processing, and
resource allocation, or application tasks which may include detection, classification, localization, or
tracking.

Detection: The process of discovering the existence of a physical phenomenon. A threshold-based

detector may flag a detection whenever the signature of a physical phenomenon is determined to be
significant enough compared with the threshold.

Classification: The assignment of class labels to a set of physical phenomena being observed

Localization and tracking: The estimation of the state of a physical entity such as a physical
phenomenon or a sensor node from a set of measurements. Tracking produces a series of estimates over
time.

Value of information or information utility: A mapping of data to a scalar number, in the context of the
overall system task and knowledge. For example, information utility of a piece of sensor data may be
characterized by its relevance to an estimation task at hand and computed by a mutual information function.

Resource: Resources include sensors, communication links, processors, on-board memory, and node
energy reserves. Resource allocation assigns resources to tasks, typically optimizing some performance
objective.

Sensor tasking: The assignment of sensors to a particular task and the control of sensor state (e.g., on/off,
pan/tilt) for accomplishing the task.

Node services: Services such as time synchronization and node localization that enable applications to
discover properties of a node and the nodes to organize themselves into a useful network.
 Data storage: Sensor information is stored, indexed, and accessed by applications. Storage may be local
to the node where the data is generated, load-balanced across a network, or anchored at a few points
(warehouses).

Embedded operating system (OS): The run-time system support for sensor network applications. An
embedded OS typically provides an abstraction of system resources and a set of utilities

System performance goal: The abstract characterization of system properties. Examples include
scalability, robustness, and network longevity, each of which may be measured by a set of evaluation
metrics.

Evaluation metric: A measurable quantity that describes how well the system is performing on some
absolute scale. Examples include packet loss (system), network dwell time (system), track loss
(application), false alarm rate (application), probability of correct association (application), location error
(application), or processing latency (application/system).

UNIQUE CONSTRAINTS AND CHALLENGES:

Unlike a centralized system, a sensor network is subject to a unique set of resource constraints such
as finite on-board battery power and limited network communication bandwidth.
In a typical sensor network, each sensor node operates untethered and has a microprocessor and a
small amount of memory for signal processing and task scheduling.
Each node is also equipped with one or more sensing devices such as acoustic microphone arrays,
video or still cameras, infrared (IR), seismic, or magnetic sensors. Each sensor node communicates
wirelessly with a few other local nodes within its radio communication range
Limited hardware: Each node has limited processing, storage, and communication capabilities, and
limited energy supply and bandwidth.
Limited support for networking: The network is peer-to-peer, with a mesh topology and dynamic,
mobile, and unreliable connectivity. There are no universal routing protocols or central registry
services. Each node acts both as a router and as an application host.
Limited support for software development: The tasks are typically real-time and massively
distributed, involve dynamic collaboration among nodes, and must handle multiple competing
events. Global properties can be specified only via local instructions. Because of the coupling
 between applications and system layers, the software architecture must be codesigned with the
information processing architecture.
APPLICATIONS OF WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

These networks are used in environmental tracking, such as forest

detection, animal tracking, flood detection, forecasting and weather
prediction, and also in commercial applications like seismic activities
prediction and monitoring.
Military applications, such as tracking and environment monitoring
surveillance applications use these networks. The sensor nodes from
sensor networks are dropped to the field of interest and are remotely
controlled by a user. Enemy tracking, security detections are also
performed by using these networks.
Health applications, such as Tracking and monitoring of patients and
doctors use these networks.
The most frequently used wireless sensor networks applications in the
field of Transport systems such as monitoring of traffic, dynamic routing
management and monitoring of parking lots, etc., use these networks.
Rapid emergency response, industrial process monitoring, automated
building climate control, ecosystem and habitat monitoring, civil
structural health monitoring, etc., use these networks.
Environmental monitoring (e.g., traffic, habitat, security)
Industrial sensing and diagnostics (e.g., appliances, factory, supply
chains)
Infrastructure protection (e.g., power grids, water distribution)
Battlefield awareness (e.g., multitarget tracking) ]
 Context-aware computing (e.g., intelligent home, responsive
environment)

LIMITATIONS OF WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Possess very little storage capacity a few hundred kilobytes
Possess modest processing power-8MHz
Works in short communication range consumes a lot of power
Requires minimal energy constrains protocols
Have batteries with a finite life time
Passive devices provide little energy
In-network processing consists in performing data aggregation (e.g., computing average of some values)
at intermediate nodes between the sources and the sink. In this way, the amount of data is reduced while
traversing the network towards the sink

Collaboration and 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 itself in various forms to achieve this collaboration, as
opposed 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 efficiently, readings from individual sensors can be aggregated as they
propagate through the network, reducing the amount of data to be transmitted and hence improving the
energy efficiency

Collaboration and in-network processing

In some applications a single sensor node is not able to handle the given task or provide the
requested information.

Instead of sending the information form various source to an external network/node, the
information can be processed in the network itself.

e.g. data aggregation, summarisation and then propagating the processed data with
reduced size (hence improving energy efficiency by reducing the amount of data to
be transmitted).