What Is Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)?

If you love WSNs as much as we do, you'll love what we store for you today. We will talk about how wireless sensor networks (WSNs) work, what they can do, and what they need to do. First things first: WSNs are groups of spatially dispersed sensors dedicated to monitoring and recording the physical conditions of the environment. These sensors can measure temperature, sound, pollution levels, humidity, wind speed and direction, pressure, etc. They send data back to a central location, organized into valuable maps or graphs. You might think this sounds like much work for one little sensor, but don't worry! WSNs are smart enough to only send information when it changes significantly from the last time measured. It means that most of your sensors will spend their time sitting around doing nothing until something big happens! WSNs are designed to facilitate military operations, but their application has since been extended to health, traffic, and many other consumer and industrial areas; A WSN consists of a few hundred to thousands of sensor nodes. The sensor equipment includes a radio transceiver, an antenna, a microcontroller, an electronic interfacing circuit, and an energy source, usually a battery. The sensor nodes can range from the size of a shoe as small as a grain. Their prices vary from a few pennies to hundreds of dollars depending on the functionality parameters of a sensor, like energy consumption, computational speed rate, bandwidth, and memory. The first WSNs used wired sensors for communication between nodes and base stations. However, these wired sensors had limited mobility due to their reliance on wires or cables that connected them or with base stations. This limitation has been overcome by wireless sensors communicating through radio waves instead of physical wires or cables between themselves or base stations.