WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

With the help of technological advances in micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and wireless communications, low-cost, low-power, and multi-functional wireless sensing devices have been developed. When these devices are deployed over a wide geographical region, they can collect information about the environment and efficiently collaborate to process such information by forming a distributed communication network, called a wireless sensor network (WSN), as illustrated in Figure 1.1. A WSN is a special case of an ad-hoc wireless network, and assumes a multi-hop communication framework with no common infrastructure, where the sensors spontaneously cooperate to deliver information by forwarding packets from a source to a destination. The number of practical applications involving WSNs keeps growing rapidly, and WSNs have been regarded as providing the fundamental infrastructure for future communications due to a variety of promising potential applications: monitoring the health status of humans, animals, plants, and the environment; control and instrumentation of industrial machines and home appliances; homeland security; detection of chemical and biological threats and leaks, etc.

When designing sensor networks, there are a number of important factors to be considered such as tolerance to node failures, scalability, dynamic network topology, hardware constraints, production cost, and power consumption. In general, the lifetime of a sensor network is proportional to that of a battery since the sensor nodes are usually inaccessible after deployment. Moreover, due to the space limitations and other practical constraints in sensor nodes, power is a scarce resource for practical WSNs. For these reasons, energy efficiency in general has top priority when designing WSNs out of all the above mentioned design considerations.