Wireless Sensor Networks Essentials

Abstract

Significant developments in scalable standards are now pacing adoption and presenting wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in applications welcomed at IT, industry, home, work,.., everywhere. Wireless sensors can be deployed quickly in an ad hoc fashion and used to report environmental changes, ensure the efficiency of industrial processes in an oil refinery, determine how much power the blade servers in a data center are using, or tell if the refrigerator is still as energy efficient as when it was purchased. In the 15 years that WSNs have been around, improvements in their architecture and protocols have continued to push applications to the mainstream. Semiconductor technology continues to follow Moore’s law, providing smaller, more powerful and cheaper wireless devices. There are now established and reliable low-power standards supporting the multiplicity of WSNs applications. The Internet, the largest known network, has extended into the world of low-power embedded WSNs devices. Stepwise, WSNs energy considerations and perspectives are to be introduced with depth and focus.