Wireless Sensor Networks

Unlike in wired network, in wireless you don’t have wire connecting each and every node (device) in the network. In here devices are connected to the network using mostly radio waves.
Development of wireless sensors were booted by the military researches because of the high military value they possessed. But today these sensor network technologies have penetrated each and every corner of the world. Modern housing equipments, environmental monitoring, healthcare sector are the core areas benefiting through this.

So let’s see the parts of a sensor node
Normally each node has a radio transceiver or other wireless communication device, microcontroller, an energy source. Size of a sensor node can vary from depending on the service provided by the sensor and the technology which has been used to develop it. Today we have sensor nodes of a size of small dust and which are intelligent enough to identify an object or a specific chemical.

Key areas today using wireless technology

Environmental monitoring
Habitat monitoring
Acoustic detection
Seismic Detection
Military surveillance
Inventory tracking
Medical monitoring
Smart spaces
Process Monitoring
Structural health monitoring
In WSN what is the scarcest resource?The answer will be power or the energy. As these sensor nodes are laid in different places where supply of the power is very limited and still today we don’t have a technology to transfer energy through air power is a key issue. The most energy consuming operation is transmission. As each node has to transmit its data to its base station living long and communicating is really a challenge.
Best solutions to these issues are still on research level and in my point of view what we can save energy by reducing the weight of the transmission data and reducing the data transmission distance because of the polynomial growth of the power with the distance.