Wireless Sensor Networks and Applications

A sensor network is a computer network of many spatially distributed devices using sensors to monitor conditions, such as sound, temperature, pressure, vibration, motion, or life-threatening pollutions (e.g., radiation and biochemical). A complete sensor device is normally equipped with sensing, computation, and communication capabilities. This configuration allows sensor devices to communicate with each other, and also relies upon the peer sensors to transport data to a monitoring computer. Usually sensor devices are small so that they can be produced and deployed in large numbers. However this attribute also severely constrains the availability of their resources in terms of energy, memory, computational speed, and bandwidth.