Sensor Networks Unit 1
Sensor Networks Unit 1
Sensor Networks Unit 1
Ambient Intelligence
Where many different devices will gather and process information from many
different sources to both control physical processes and to interact with human users.
Transformation occurs from washing machine to wrist band, computation will
surround us in our daily lives.
Example:
Ubiquitous Computing
Person to person
Person to machine
Machine to machine.
Realization of vision
To realize this vision, a crucial aspect is needed in addition to computation and control:
communication.
For some application scenarios, such networks of sensors and actuators are easily built
using existing, wired networking technologies.
For many other application types, however, the need to wire together all these entities
constitutes a considerable obstacle to success:
Wiring is expensive, in particular, given the large number of devices that is imaginable in
our environment; wires constitute a maintenance problem; wires prevent entities from
being mobile; and wires can prevent sensors or actuators from being close to the
phenomenon that they are supposed to control.
Hence, wireless communication between such devices is, in many application scenarios,
an inevitable requirement
Realizing such wireless sensor networks is a crucial step toward a deeply penetrating
Ambient Intelligence concept as they provide, figuratively, the “last 100 meters” of
pervasive control. To realize them, a better understanding of their potential
applications and the ensuing requirements is necessary, as is an idea of the enabling
technologies. These questions are answered in the following sections; a position of
wireless sensor networks and related networking concepts such as fieldbuses or mobile
ad hoc network is provided as well.
Physical Features:
Infrastructure-based wireless
networks
• Typical wireless network: Based on
infrastructure
• E.g., GSM, UMTS, …
• Base stations connected to a wired
backbone network
• Mobile entities communicate wirelessly to
these base stations
• Traffic between different mobile entities is
relayed by base stations and wired backbone
• Mobility is supported by switching from one
base station to another
• Backbone infrastructure required for
administrative tasks
•
Application Examples
The claim of wireless sensor network proponents is that this technological vision will
facilitate many existing application areas and bring into existence entirely new ones.
This claim depends on many factors, but a couple of the envisioned application
scenarios shall be highlighted.
Apart from the need to build cheap, simple to program and network, potentially long-
lasting sensor nodes, a crucial and primary ingredient for developing actual applications
is the actual sensing and actuating faculties with which a sensor node can be endowed.
For many physical parameters, appropriate sensor technology exists that can be
integrated in a node of a WSN. Some of the few popular ones are temperature,
humidity, visual and infrared light (from simple luminance to cameras), acoustic,
vibration (e.g. for detecting seismic disturbances), pressure, chemical sensors (for gases
of different types or to judge soil composition), mechanical stress, magnetic sensors (to
detect passing vehicles), potentially even radar. But even more sophisticated sensing
capabilities are conceivable, for example, toys in a kindergarten might have tactile or
motion sensors or be able to determine their own speed or location.
Actuators controlled by a node of a wireless sensor network are perhaps not quite as
multifaceted. Typically, they control a mechanical device like a servo drive, or they
might switch some electrical appliance by means of an electrical relay, like a lamp, a
bullhorn, or a similar device.
On the basis of nodes that have such sensing and/or actuation faculties, in combination
with computation and communication abilities, many different kinds of applications can
be constructed, with very different types of nodes, even of different kinds within one
application.
Intelligent buildings
Reduce energy wastage by proper humidity, ventilation, air conditioning (HVAC)
control
high-resolution monitoring of temperature, airflow, humidity, and other physical
parameters
The main advantage here is the collaborative mapping of physical parameters- If
power supply is not available, lifetime requirements can be very high- but the
number of required nodes, and hence the cost, is relatively modest, given the costs
of an entire building.
sensor nodes can be used to monitor mechanical stress levels of buildings in
seismically active zones
Needs measurements about room occupancy, temperature, air flow, …
Monitor mechanical stress after earthquakes
Sensor can be retrofitted into existing buildings.
Facility management
Keyless entry applications where people wear badges that allow a WSN to check
which person is allowed to enter which areas of a larger company site.
extended to the detection of intruders
wide area WSN could track such a vehicle’s position and alert security personnel
WSN could be used in a chemical plant to scan for leaking chemicals
Able to operate a long time on batteries.
Intrusion detection into industrial sites and other restricted areas
Control of leakages in chemical plants, …
Is to fix sensor nodes to difficult to- reach areas of machinery where they can detect
vibration patterns that indicate the need for maintenance.
Embed sensing/control functions into places no cable has gone before
E.g., tire pressure monitoring
The main advantage of WSNs here is the cable free operation, avoiding a maintenance
problem in itself and allowing a cheap, often retrofitted installation of such sensors.
Wired power supply may or may not be available depending on the scenario;
if it is not available, sensors should last a long time on a finite supply of energy since
exchanging batteries is usually impractical and costly.
On the other hand, the size of nodes is often not a crucial issue, nor is the price very
heavily constrained.
Precision agriculture
The use of WSN in health care applications is a potentially very beneficial, but also
ethically controversial, application.
Possibilities range from postoperative and intensive care, where sensors are directly
attached to patients – the advantage of doing away with cables is considerable here – to
the long-term surveillance of (typically elderly) patients and to automatic drug
administration (embedding sensors into drug packaging, raising alarms when applied to
the wrong patient, is conceivable).
Also, patient and doctor tracking systems within hospitals can be literally lifesaving.
Logistics
It is conceivable to equip goods (individual parcels, for example) with simple sensors
that allow a simple tracking of these objects during transportation or facilitate
inventory tracking in stores or warehouses.
Much simpler and cheaper than the active communication and information
processing , it is realized by so-called Radio Frequency Identifier (RF ID) tags.
Equip goods (parcels, containers) with a sensor node
Track their whereabouts –total asset management
Note: passive readout might suffice –compare RF IDs
Telematics
Sensors embedded in the streets or roadsides can gather information about traffic
conditions at a much finer grained resolution than what is possible today .Such a so
called “intelligent roadside”
Provide better traffic control by obtaining finer-grained information about traffic
conditions
Intelligent roadside
Cars as the sensor nodes
Partially related to logistics applications are applications for the telematics context,
Application types for WSNs ,the literature include airplane wings and support for smart
spaces , applications in waste water treatment plants , instrumentation of
semiconductor processing chambers and wind tunnels , in “smart kindergartens” where
toys interact with children , the detection of floods, interactive museums , monitoring a
bird habitat on a remote island, and implanting sensors into the human body (for
glucose monitoring or as retina prosthesis).
Wireless sensor networks are to a large extent about providing the required information
at the required accuracy in time with as little resource consumption as possible.
TYPES OF APPLICATIONS
Many of these applications share some basic characteristics. In most of them, there is a
clear difference between
sources of data – the actual nodes that sense data – and
sinks – nodes where the data should be delivered to.
These sinks sometimes are part of the sensor network itself; sometimes they are clearly
systems “outside” the network (e.g. the firefighter’s PDA communicating with a WSN).
Also, there are usually, but not always, more sources than sinks and the sink is oblivious
or not interested in the identity of the sources; the data itself is much more important.
The interaction patterns between sources and sinks show some typical patterns. The
most relevant ones are:
Event detection
Sensor nodes should report to the sink(s) once they have detected the occurrence
of a specified event.
The simplest events can be detected locally by a single sensor node in isolation (e.g.
a temperature threshold is exceeded); more complicated types of events require
the collaboration of nearby or even remote sensors to decide whether a
(composite) event has occurred (e.g. a temperature gradient becomes too steep).
If several different events can occur, event classification might be an additional
issue.
Periodic measurements
Sensors can be tasked with periodically reporting measured values. Often, these reports
can be triggered by a detected event; the reporting period is application dependent.
The way a physical value like temperature changes from one place to another can
be regarded as a function of location.
A WSN can be used to approximate this unknown function (to extract its spatial
characteristics), using a limited number of samples taken at each individual sensor
node.
This approximate mapping should be made available at the sink.
The approximation accuracy and the inherent trade-off against energy
consumption.
Similarly, a relevant problem can be to find areas or points of the same given value. An
example is to find the isothermal points in a forest fire application to detect the border
of the actual fire. This can be generalized to finding “edges” in such functions or to
sending messages along the boundaries of patterns in both space and/or time .
Tracking
CHARACTERISTIC REQUIREMENTS
Type of service
Quality of service
Traditional quality of service requirements –Multimedia type applications like
bounded delay or minimum bandwidth are irrelevant when applications are
tolerant to latency or bandwidth of transmitted data is very small
But, delay is important in real time scenarios. The packet delivery ratio is an
insufficient metric.
Adapted quality concepts like reliable detection of events or the approximation
quality of a, say, temperature map is important.
Fault tolerance
The network should fulfill its task as long as possible –definition depends on
application.
Lifetime of individual nodes relatively unimportant .But often treated equivalently
Nodes depend on batteries
WSN must operate for a given mission time or as long as possible.
Alternative, solar cell might be supplement to energy supplies.
Lifetime has direct trade-offs against QoS: investing more energy can increase
quality but decrease lifetime.
The precise definition of lifetime depends on the application at hand.
A simple option is to use the time until the first node fails (or runs out of energy) as
the network lifetime.
Other options include the time until the network is disconnected in two or more
partitions, the time until 50% (or some other fixed ratio) of nodes have failed, or
the time when for the first time a point in the observed region is no longer covered
by at least a single sensor node.
Scalability
WSN might include a large number of nodes, the employed architectures and
protocols must be able to scale to these numbers.
Support large number of nodes
Number of nodes per unit area-the density of the network can vary considerably.
Different applications will have very different node densities
Density can vary over time and space because nodes fail or move.
Density also does not have to homogeneous in network and the network should
adapt to such variations.
Programmability
Nodes should posses the capability to react flexibly on changes in their tasks.
Re-programming of nodes in the field might be necessary, improve flexibility.
These nodes should be programmable
Their programming must be changeable during operation when new tasks become
Important.
A fixed way of information processing is insufficient.
Maintainability
As both the environment of a WSN and the WSN itself change (Depleted batteries,
failing nodes, new tasks), the system has to adapt.
It has to change operational parameters or to choose different trade-offs based on
requirements e.g. provide lower quality when energy resource become scarce.
WSN has to adapt to changes, self-monitoring, adapt operation
Incorporate possible additional resources, e.g., newly deployed nodes
REQUIRED MECHANISM
Energy-efficient operation
Auto-configuration
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.
Nodes in the network collaborate towards a joint goal
Pre-processing data in network (as opposed to at the edge) can greatly improve
efficiency
Data centric
Locality
Rather a design guideline than a proper mechanism, the principle of locality will
have to be embraced extensively to ensure, in particular, scalability.
Nodes, which are very limited in resources like memory, should attempt to limit the
state that they accumulate during protocol processing to only information about
their direct neighbors.
The hope is that this will allow the network to scale to large numbers of nodes
without having to rely on powerful processing at each single node.
How to combine the locality principle with efficient protocol designs is still an open
research topic, however.
Exploit trade-offs
Similar to the locality principle, WSNs will have to rely to a large degree on
exploiting various inherent trade-offs between mutually contradictory goals, both
during system/protocol design and at runtime.
Examples for such trade-offs have been mentioned already:
1. higher energy expenditure allows higher result accuracy, or
2. A longer lifetime of the entire network trades off against lifetime of
individual nodes.
Another important trade-off is node density: depending on application,
deployment, and node failures at runtime, the density of the network can change
considerably – the protocols will have to handle very different situations, possibly
present at different places of a single network.
Harnessing these mechanisms such that they are easy to use, yet sufficiently
general, for an application programmer is a major challenge.
Departing from an address-centric view of the network requires new programming
interfaces that go beyond the simple semantics of the conventional socket interface
and allow concepts like required accuracy, energy/accuracy trade-offs, or scoping.
The reorganization of the network as nodes move about and handling the problems of
the limited reach of wireless communication. Literature on MANETs that summarize
these problems and their solutions abound, as these networks are still a very active field
of research; popular books include.
These general problems are shared between MANETs and WSNs. Nonetheless, there are
some principal differences between the two concepts, warranting a distinction between
them and regarding separate research efforts for each one.
MANETs are associated with somewhat different applications as well as different user
equipment than WSNs.
In a MANET, the terminal can be fairly powerful (a laptop or a PDA) with a
comparably large battery. This equipment is needed because in the typical MANET
applications, there is usually a human in the loop.
The MANET is used for voice communication between two distant peers, or it is used
for access to a remote infrastructure like a Web server. Therefore, the equipment has
to be powerful enough to support these applications.
Application specific
Environment interaction
WSNs have to interact with the environment, their traffic characteristics can be
expected to be very different from other, human-driven forms of networks.
WSNs are likely to exhibit very low data rates over a large timescale, but can have
very bursty traffic when something happens (a phenomenon known from real-time
systems as event showers or alarm storms).
Long periods (months) of inactivity can alternate with short periods (seconds or
minutes) of very high activity in the network, pushing its capacity to the limits.
MANETs, on the other hand, are used to support more conventional applications
(Web, voice, and so on) with their comparably well understood traffic
characteristics.
Scale
Energy
Self-configurability
Similar to ad hoc networks, WSNs will most likely be required to self-configure into
connected networks, but the difference in traffic, energy trade-offs, and so forth,
could require new solutions.
Nevertheless, it is in this respect that MANETs and WSNs are probably most similar.
Data centric
Sensor nodes are simple and energy supply is scarce, the operating and networking
software must be kept orders of magnitude simpler compared to today’s desktop
computers.
This simplicity may also require breaking with conventional layering rules for
networking software, since layering abstractions typically cost time and space.
Also, Resources like memory, which is relevant for comparably heavy-weight routing
protocols as those used in MANETs, is not available in arbitrary quantities, requiring
new, scalable, resource-efficient solutions.
Mobility
The mobility problem in MANETs is caused by nodes moving around, changing multihop
routes in the network that have to be handled. In a WSN, this problem can also exist if
the sensor nodes are mobile in the given application.
First, the sensor network can be used to detect and observe a physical phenomenon (in
the intrusion detection applications, for example). This phenomenon is the cause of
events that happen in the network (like raising of alarms) and can also cause some local
processing, for example, determining whether there really is an intruder.
Second, the sinks of information in the network (nodes where information should be
delivered to) can be mobile as well. In principle, this is no different than node mobility in
the general MANET sense, but can cause some difficulties for protocols that operate
efficiently in fully static scenarios. Here, carefully observing trade-offs is necessary.
Both MANET and WSNs, mobility can be correlated – a group of nodes moving in a
related, similar fashion. This correlation can be caused in a MANET by, for example,
belonging to a group of people traveling together. In a WSN, the movement of nodes
can be correlated because nodes are jointly carried by a storm, a river, or some other
fluid.
Conclusion/Summary
WSNs have to support very different applications, that they have to interact with the
physical environment and that they have to carefully adjudicate various trade-offs
justifies considering WSNs as a system concept distinct from MANETs
Miniaturization of hardware
Reduced chip size and improved energy efficiency is accompanied by reduced
cost(For wireless communication, simple microcontroller, sensing, batteries)
Sensor node is accompanied with device for energy scavenging, recharging the
battery with energy gathered from the environment Counterpart for hardware is
software
To design appropriate communication protocols
Building such wireless sensor networks has only become possible with some
fundamental advances in enabling technologies. First and foremost among these
technologies is the miniaturization of hardware. Smaller feature sizes in chips have
driven down the power consumption of the basic components of a sensor node to a
level that the constructions of WSNs can be contemplated. This is particularly relevant
to microcontrollers and memory chips as such, but also, the radio modems, responsible
for wireless communication, have become much more energy efficient.
Reduced chip size and improved energy efficiency is accompanied by reduced
cost, which is necessary to make redundant deployment of nodes affordable.
Next to processing and communication, the actual sensing equipment is the third
relevant technology. Here, however, it is difficult to generalize because of the vast range
of possible sensors
These three basic parts of a sensor node have to accompanied by power supply. This
requires, depending on application, high capacity batteries that last for long times, that
is, have only a negligible self-discharge rate, and that can efficiently provide small
amounts of current. Ideally, a sensor node also has a device for Energy Scavenging,
recharging the battery with energy gathered from the environment – solar cells or
vibration-based power generation are conceivable options.
Such a concept requires the battery to be efficiently chargeable with small amounts of
current, which is not a standard ability. Both batteries and energy scavenging are still
objects of ongoing research.
The counterpart to the basic hardware technologies is software. The first question to
answer here is the principal division of tasks and functionalities in a single node – the
architecture of the operating system or runtime environment. This environment has to
support simple retasking, cross-layer information exchange, and modularity to allow for
simple maintenance. This software architecture on a single node has to be extended to a
network architecture, where the division of tasks between nodes, not only on a single
node, becomes the relevant question – for example, how to structure interfaces for
application programmers. The third part to solve then is the question of how to design
appropriate communication protocols.