Wireless Sensor Networks

Chapter 1: Motivation & Applications

António Grilo

Courtesy: Holger Karl, UPB

Goals of this chapter
• Give an understanding what ad hoc & sensor networks are
good for, what their intended application areas are
• Commonalities and differences
• Differences to related network types
• Limitations of these concepts

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 2

Outline
• Infrastructure for wireless?
• (Mobile) ad hoc networks
• Wireless sensor networks
• Comparison

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 3

Infrastructure-based wireless networks
• Typical wireless network: Based on infrastructure
• E.g., GSM, UMTS, …
• Base stations connected to a wired backbone network
• Mobile entities communicate wirelessly to these base stations
• Traffic between different mobile entities is relayed by base stations
and wired backbone
• Mobility is supported by switching from one base station to another
• Backbone infrastructure required for administrative tasks

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Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 4

Infrastructure-based wireless networks – Limits?
• What if …
• No infrastructure is available? – E.g., in disaster areas, underwater
• It is too expensive/inconvenient to set up? – E.g., in remote, large
construction sites
• It is too expensive to use? – E.g., SATCOM
• There is no time to set it up? – E.g., in military operations

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 5

Possible applications for infrastructure-free networks
• Factory floor • Disaster recovery • Car-to-car
automation communication

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• Survivable communications infrastructure: Mesh Vegas, IEEE 802.16

• Military networking: Tanks, soldiers, unmanned platforms …
• Finding out empty parking lots in a city, without asking a server
• Search-and-rescue in an avalanche
• Personal area networking (watch, glasses, PDA, medical appliance, …)
• …

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 6

Outline
• Infrastructure for wireless?
• (Mobile) ad hoc networks
• Wireless sensor networks
• Comparison

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 7

Solution: (Wireless) ad hoc networks
• Try to construct a network without infrastructure, using
networking abilities of the participants
• This is an ad hoc network – a network constructed “for a special
purpose”

• Simplest example: Laptops in a conference room –

a single-hop ad hoc network

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 8

Problems/challenges for ad hoc networks
• Without a central infrastructure, things become much more
difficult
• Problems are due to
• Lack of central entity for organization available
• Limited range of wireless communication
• Mobility of participants
• Battery-operated entities

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 9

No central entity ! self-organization
• Without a central entity (like a base station), participants
must organize themselves into a network (self-
organization)
• Pertains to (among others):
• Medium access control – no base station can assign transmission
resources, must be decided in a distributed fashion
• Finding a route from one participant to another

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 10

Limited range ! multi-hopping
• For many scenarios, communication with peers outside
immediate communication range is required
• Direct communication limited because of distance, obstacles,
energy consumption…
• Solution: multi-hop network

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 11

Mobility ! Suitable, adaptive protocols
• In many (not all!) ad hoc network applications, participants
move around
• In cellular network: simply hand over to another base station

• In mobile ad hoc
networks (MANET):
• Mobility changes
neighborhood relationship
• Must be compensated for
• E.g., routes in the network
have to be changed
accordingly
• Complicated by scale
• Large number of such
nodes difficult to support

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 12

Battery-operated devices ! energy-efficient operation
• Often (not always!), participants in an ad hoc network draw
energy from batteries
• Desirable: long run time for
• Individual devices
• Network as a whole
! Energy-efficient networking protocols
• E.g., use multi-hop routes with low energy consumption (energy/bit)
• E.g., take available battery capacity of devices into account when
setting-up routes
• How to resolve conflicts between different optimizations? E.g.
latency vs energy

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 13

Outline
• Infrastructure for wireless?
• (Mobile) ad hoc networks
• Wireless sensor networks
• Applications
• Requirements & mechanisms
• Comparison

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 14

Wireless sensor networks
• Participants in the previous examples were devices close
to a human user, interacting with humans

• Alternative concept:
Instead of focusing interaction on humans, focus on
interacting with environment
• Network is embedded in environment
• Nodes in the network are equipped with sensing and actuation to
measure/influence environment
• Nodes process information and communicate it wirelessly

! Wireless sensor networks (WSN)

• Or: Wireless sensor & actuator networks (WSAN)

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 15

WSNs: May not be the best solution when...
• It is more efficient to do the job locally:
• Friendly environment
• Very restricted Area
• Very smooth temporal variability of target measures

• It is more efficient to do the job remotely

• Very large area
• Very large-scale variability of target measures
• Very long sensor range

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 16

WSNs: May be advantageous in scenarios that combine...

• Harsh environment: E.g., battlefield, nuclear plant

• Short sensor range: E.g., temperature, smoke detection
• Large area: E.g., forest, agricultural field, building
• High temporal/spatial variability: E.g., temperature in
wildfire
• Event detection: E.g., intrusion detection in restricted areas

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 17

WSN application examples
• Disaster relief operations
• Drop sensor nodes from an aircraft over a wildfire
• Each node measures temperature
• Derive a “temperature map”
• Biodiversity mapping
• Use sensor nodes to observe wildlife

• Intelligent buildings (or bridges)

• Reduce energy wastage by proper humidity,
ventilation, air conditioning (HVAC) control
• Needs measurements about room occupancy,
temperature, air flow, …
• Monitor mechanical stress after earthquakes

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 18

WSN application scenarios
• Facility management
• Intrusion detection into industrial sites and other restricted areas
• Control of leakages in chemical plants, …
• Machine surveillance and preventive maintenance
• Embed sensing/control functions into places no cable has gone
before
• E.g., tire pressure monitoring
• Precision agriculture
• Bring out fertilizer/pesticides/irrigation only where needed
• Medicine and health care
• Post-operative or intensive care
• Long-term surveillance of chronically ill patients or the elderly

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 19

WSN application scenarios
• Logistics
• Equip goods (parcels, containers) with a sensor node
• Track their whereabouts – total asset management
• Note: passive readout might suffice – compare RF IDs
• Vehicle Telematics
• Provide better traffic control by obtaining finer-grained information
about traffic conditions
• Intelligent roadside
• Cars as the sensor nodes
• Intruder Detection and Tracking in Military/Security Ops
• Scatter seismic, noise, movement sensors in sensitive sectors
• E.g., IST FP6 UbiSec&Sens (Homeland Security scenario)

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 20

WSN application scenarios (not only land)
• Oceanographic WSN
• Deploy oceanographic buoys to perform
measurements far from the coastline
• E.g., EEZ-WSN project

• Underwater WSNs
• Employ Acoustic communications
• Pollution detection in shallow waters
• Measurement seismic activity on the sea bed
• Anti-submarine warfare

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 21

Roles of participants in WSN
• Sources of data: Measure data, report them “somewhere”
• Typically equip with different kinds of actual sensors

• Sinks of data: Interested in receiving data from WSN

• May be part of the WSN or external entity, PDA, gateway, …

• Actuators: Control some device based on data, usually

also a sink

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 22

Structuring WSN application types
• Interaction patterns between sources and sinks classify
application types
• Event detection: Nodes locally detect events (maybe jointly with
nearby neighbors), report these events to interested sinks
• Event classification additional option
• Periodic measurement
• Function approximation: Use sensor network to approximate a
function of space and/or time (e.g., temperature map)
• Edge detection: Find edges (or other structures) in such a
function (e.g., where is the zero degree border line?)
• Tracking: Report (or at least, know) position of an observed
intruder (“pink elephant”)

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 23

Deployment options for WSN
• How are sensor nodes deployed in their environment?
• Dropped from aircraft ! Random deployment
• Usually uniform random distribution for nodes over finite area is
assumed
• Is that a likely proposition?
• Well planned, fixed ! Regular deployment
• E.g., in preventive maintenance or similar
• Not necessarily geometric structure, but that is often a convenient
assumption
• Mobile sensor nodes
• Can move to compensate for deployment shortcomings
• Can be passively moved around by some external force (wind, water)
• Can actively seek out “interesting” areas

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 24

Maintenance options
• Feasible and/or practical to maintain sensor nodes?
• E.g., to replace batteries?
• Or: unattended operation?
• Impossible but not relevant? Mission lifetime might be very small

• Energy supply?
• Limited from point of deployment?
• Some form of recharging, energy scavenging from environment?
• E.g., solar cells

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 25

Outline
• Infrastructure for wireless?
• (Mobile) ad hoc networks
• Wireless sensor networks
• Applications
• Requirements & mechanisms
• Comparison

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 26

Characteristic requirements for WSNs
• Type of service of WSN
• Not simply moving bits like another network
• Rather: provide answers (not just numbers)
• Issues like geographic scoping are natural requirements, absent from
other networks
• Quality of service
• Traditional QoS metrics do not apply
• Still, service of WSN must be “good”: Right answers at the right time
• Fault tolerance
• Be robust against node failure (running out of energy, physical destruction,
…)
• Lifetime
• The network should fulfill its task as long as possible – definition depends
on application
• Lifetime of individual nodes relatively unimportant
• But often treated equivalently

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 27

Characteristic requirements for WSNs
• Scalability
• Support large number of nodes
• Wide range of densities
• Vast or small number of nodes per unit area, very application-
dependent
• Programmability
• Re-programming of nodes in the field might be necessary, improve
flexibility
• Maintainability
• WSN has to adapt to changes, self-monitoring, adapt operation
• Incorporate possible additional resources, e.g., newly deployed
nodes

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 28

Required mechanisms to meet requirements
• Multi-hop wireless communication
• Energy-efficient operation
• Both for communication and computation, sensing, actuating
• Auto-configuration
• Manual configuration just not an option
• Collaboration & in-network processing
• Nodes in the network collaborate towards a joint goal
• Pre-processing data in network (as opposed to at the edge) can
greatly improve efficiency

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 29

Required mechanisms to meet requirements
• Data centric networking
• Focusing network design on data, not on node identifies (id-
centric networking)
• To improve efficiency
• Locality
• Do things locally (on node or among nearby neighbors) as far as
possible
• Exploit tradeoffs
• E.g., between invested energy and accuracy

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 30

Outline
• Infrastructure for wireless?
• (Mobile) ad hoc networks
• Wireless sensor networks
• Comparison

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 31

MANET vs. WSN
• Many commonalities: Self-organization, energy efficiency, (often)
wireless multi-hop
• Many differences
• Applications, equipment: MANETs more powerful (read: expensive)
equipment assumed, often “human in the loop”-type applications, higher
data rates, more resources
• Application-specific: WSNs depend much stronger on application
specifics; MANETs comparably uniform
• Environment interaction: core of WSN, absent in MANET
• Scale: WSN might be much larger (although contestable)
• Energy: WSN tighter requirements, maintenance issues
• Dependability/QoS: in WSN, individual node may be dispensable
(network matters), QoS different because of different applications
• Data centric vs. id-centric networking
• Mobility: different mobility patterns like (in WSN, sinks might be mobile,
usual nodes static)

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 32

Wireless fieldbuses and WSNs
• Fieldbus. (e.g., CAN):
• Network type invented for real-time communication, e.g., for
factory-floor automation
• Inherent notion of sensing/measuring and controlling
• Wireless fieldbus: Real-time communication over wireless

! Big similarities

• Differences
• Scale – WSN often intended for larger scale
• Real-time – WSN usually not intended to provide (hard) real-time
guarantees as attempted by fieldbuses

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 33

Enabling technologies for WSN
• Cost reduction
• For wireless communication, simple microcontroller, sensing,
batteries
• Miniaturization
• Some applications demand small size
• “Smart dust” as the most extreme vision
• Energy scavenging
• Recharge batteries from ambient energy (light, vibration, …)
• Environment friendly electronics
• Disposable sensors present environmental issues

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 34

Conclusion
• MANETs and WSNs are challenging and promising system
concepts
• Many similarities, many differences
• Both require new types of architectures & protocols
compared to “traditional” wired/wireless networks
• In particular, application-specificness is a new issue

Wireless Sensor Networks: Motivation and Applications 35