Introduction to Wireless Sensor Networking

This chapter introduces the topic of wireless sensor networks from the applications perspective. A wireless sensor network consists of a possibly large number of wireless devices able to take environmental measurements such as temperature, light, sound, and humidity. These sensor readings are transmitted over a wireless channel to a running application that makes decisions based on these sensor readings. Authors describe some examples of proposed wireless sensor applications, and consider the following two questions to motivate an application-based viewpoint. What aspects of wireless sensors make the implementation of applications more challenging, or at least different? One widely recognized issue is the limited power available to each wireless sensor node, but there are other challenges such as limited storage or processing. What services are required for a wireless sensor network application to achieve its intended purpose? A number of widely applicable services, such as time synchronization and location determination are briefly discussed in this chapter. Other services are needed to support database requirements, such as message routing, topology management, and data aggregation and storage. As most of these topics are covered in separate chapters, this chapter serves to provide a broad framework to enable the reader to see how these different topics tie together into a cohesive set of capabilities for building wireless sensor network applications.