Wireless Sensor Networks:

A Survey

Arslan Munir
EEL 6935

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 Outline
• Introduction
• Wireless Sensor Networks Applications
• Factors Influencing Sensor Network Design
• Sensor Node Components
• Sensor Networks Communication Architecture
• Sensor Network Protocols
• Sensor Networks Operating Systems
• Sensor Networks Simulators
• Conclusion 2
 Introduction
• sensor
– A transducer
– converts physical phenomenon e.g. heat, light, motion, vibration,
and sound into electrical signals
• sensor node
– basic unit in sensor network
– contains on-board sensors, processor, memory, transceiver, and
power supply
• sensor network
– consists of a large number of sensor nodes
– nodes deployed either inside or very close to the sensed
phenomenon
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Wireless Sensor Networks Applications

Military Applications
• Monitoring friendly forces, equipment, and
ammunition
• Battlefield surveillance
• Reconnaissance of opposing forces and terrain
• Targeting
• Battle damage assessment
• Nuclear, biological, and chemical attack detection
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Wireless Sensor Networks Applications

Environmental Applications

• Forest fire detection

• Bio-complexity mapping of environment
• Flood detection
• Precision Agriculture
• Air and water pollution

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Wireless Sensor Networks Applications

Health Applications

• Telemonitoring of human physiological data

• Tracking and monitoring doctors and patients
inside a hospital
• Drug administration in hospitals

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Wireless Sensor Networks Applications

Home and Office Applications

• Home and office automation

• Smart environment

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Wireless Sensor Networks Applications

Automotive Applications

• Reduces wiring effects

• Measurements in chambers and rotating parts
• Remote technical inspections
• Conditions monitoring e.g. at a bearing

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Wireless Sensor Networks Applications

Automotive Applications

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Wireless Sensor Networks Applications

Other Commercial Applications

• Environmental control in office buildings
(estimated energy savings $55 billion per year!)
• Interactive museums
• Detecting and monitoring car thefts
• Managing inventory control
• Vehicle tracking and detection

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Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks
ref. Georgia Institute of Technology

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 Factors Influencing WSN Design
• Fault tolerance
• Scalability
• Production costs
• Hardware constraints
• Sensor network topology
• Environment
• Transmission media
• Power Consumption
– Sensing
– Communication
– Data processing
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 Sensor Nodes

Worldsens Inc. Sensor Node Crossbow Sensor Node

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Sensor Node Components

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 Sensor Node Components
• Sensing Unit
• Processing Unit
• Transceiver Unit
• Power Unit
• Location Finding System (optional)
• Power Generator (optional)
• Mobilizer (optional)
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WSN Communication Architecture

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WSN Protocol Stack

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 A Few WSN Protocols
• Sensor management protocol
– Provides software operations needed to perform administrative
tasks e.g. moving sensor nodes, turning them on an off
• Sensor query and data dissemination protocol
– Provides user applications with interfaces to issue queries and
respond to queries
– Sensor query and tasking language (SQTL)
• Directed diffusion
• Sensor MAC (S-MAC)
• IEEE 802.15.4

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 Data-Centric Routing

• Interest dissemination is performed to assign

sensing tasks to sensor nodes
– Sinks broadcast the interest
– Sensor nodes broadcast an advertisement for available data
• Requires attribute-based naming
– Users are more interested in querying the attribute of the
phenomenon, rather than querying an individual node
– E.g. the sensor nodes in the area where temperature is
greater than 75 F

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 Data Aggregation in WSNs
• Data coming from multiple
sensor nodes are aggregated
if they are about the same
attribute of the phenomenon
when they reach the same
routing node on the way
back to the sink
– Solves implosion and overlap
problem
– Energy efficient

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 WSN Operating Systems
• TinyOS
• Contiki
• MANTIS
• BTnut
• SOS
• Nano-RK
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 TinyOS
• Event-driven programming model instead of
multithreading
• TinyOS and its programs written in nesC

Main (includes Scheduler)

Application (User Components)

Actuating Sensing Communication

Communication

Hardware Abstractions
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 TinyOS Charactersitics
• Small memory footprint
– non-preemptable FIFO task scheduling
• Power Efficient
– Puts microcontroller to sleep
– Puts radio to sleep
• Concurrency-Intensive Operations
– Event-driven architecture
– Efficient Interrupts and event handling
• No Real-time guarantees
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MICA Sensor Mote

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 MICA Mote Specifications
• 4 MHz ATMEGA103L Microprocessor
• 128 KB of Flash Program Memory
• 4KB RAM
• 10 bit Analog to Digital Converter (ADC)
• 3 Hardware Timers
• Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) bus
• External UART
• A coprocessor AT90LS2343 (to handle wireless reprogramming)
• DS2401 silicon serial number (provides unique ID to nodes)
• RF Monolithics TR1000 transceiver
• External 4Mbit Atmel AT45DB041B Serial Flash Chip (for persistent data
storage)
• Maxim1678 DC-DC Converter (provides a constant 3.0 V supply)
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 Smart Dust Mote Specifications
• 4 MHz Atmel AVR 8535 Microprocessor
• 8 KB Instruction Flash Memory
• 512 Bytes RAM
• 512 Bytes EEPROM
• Total Stored Energy approx. 1 Joule
• TinyOS Operating System (OS) with 3500 bytes
OS code space and 4500 bytes available code
space
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 WSN Development Platforms
• Crossbow
• Dust Networks
• Sensoria Corporation
• Ember Corporation
• Worldsens

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 WSN Simulators
• NS-2
• GloMoSim
• OPNET
• SensorSim
• J-Sim
• OMNeT++
• Sidh
• SENS 28
 WSN Emulators

• TOSSIM
• ATEMU
• Avrora
• EmStar

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 Conclusion
• WSNs possible today due to technological
advancement in various domains
• Envisioned to become an essential part of our lives
• Design Constraints need to be satisfied for
realization of sensor networks
• Tremendous research efforts being made in
different layers of WSNs protocol stack

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 References
• I. F. Akyildiz, W. Su, Y. Sankarasubramaniam, and E.
Cayirci, “Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey”, Elsevier
Computer Networks, volume 38, Issue 4, pp. 393-422,
March 2002.
• Dr. Victor Leung, Lecture Slides on “Wireless Sensor
Networks”, University of British Columbia, Canada
• D. Curren, “A Survey of Simulation in Sensor Networks”
• Wikipedia, [Available Online]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Sensor_Networ
ks
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 References

• Dr. Chenyang Lu Slides on “Berkeley Motes and

TinyOS”, Washington University in St. Louis, USA
• J. Hill and D. Culler, “A Wireless Embedded Sensor
Architecture for System-Level Optimization”,
Technical Report, U.C. Berkeley, 2001.
• X. Su, B.S. Prabhu, and R. Gadh, “RFID based General
Wireless Sensor Interface”, Technical Report, UCLA,
2003.
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Thank you!

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