---

What is a sensor network?

A sensor network is an infrastructure comprised of sensing (measuring), computing, and communication elements that gives an administrator the ability to the instrument, observe, and react to events and phenomena in a specified environment. The administrator typically is a civil, governmental, commercial, or industrial entity. The environment can be the physical world, a biological system, or an information technology (IT) framework. Network(ed) sensor systems are seen by observers as an important technology that will experience major deployment in the next few years for a plethora of applications, not the least being national security. Typical applications include, but are not limited to, data collection, monitoring, surveillance, and medical telemetry. In addition to sensing, one is often also interested in control and activation.

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.

Applications of Sensor Networks

Traditionally, sensor networks have been used in the context of high-end applications such as radiation and nuclear-threat detection systems, over-the-horizon
weapon sensors for ships, biomedical applications, habitat sensing, and seismic monitoring. More recently, interest has focused on networked biological and chemical sensors for national security applications; furthermore, evolving interest extends to direct consumer applications. Existing and potential applications of
sensor networks include, among others, military sensing, physical security, air traffic control, traffic surveillance, video surveillance, industrial and manufacturing
automation, process control, inventory management, distributed robotics, weather sensing, environmental monitoring, national border monitoring, and building and
structures monitoring. A short list of applications follows.

 

Military applications
1. Monitoring inimical forces
2. Monitoring friendly forces and equipment
3. Military-theater or battlefield surveillance
4. Targeting
5. Battle damage assessment
6. Nuclear, biological, and chemical attack detection
and more...

Environmental applications
1. Microclimates
2. Forest fire detection
3. Flood detection
4. Precision agriculture
and more...

Health applications
1. Remote monitoring of physiological data
2. Tracking and monitoring doctors and patients inside a hospital
3. Drug administration
4. Elderly assistance
and more...

Home applications
1. Home automation
2. Instrumented environment
3. Automated meter reading
and more...

Commercial applications
1. Environmental control in industrial and office buildings
2. Inventory control
3. Vehicle tracking and detection
4. Traffic flow surveillance
and more ...

Characteristics

Deeply distributed architecture: localized coordination to reach entire system goals, no infrastructure with no central control support
Autonomous operation: self-organization, self-configuration, adaptation, exception-free TCP/IP is open, widely implemented, supports multiple physical networks, relatively efficient and lightweight, but requires manual intervention to configure and to use.
Energy conservation: physical, MAC, link, route, application
Scalability: scale with node density, number, and kinds of networks.
Data centric network: address free route, named data, reinforcement-based adaptation, in-network data aggregation

Challenges

1. Limited battery power
2. Limited storage and computation
3. Lower bandwidth and high error rates
4. Scalability to 1000s of nodes

---