Wireless Sensor Networks : Research Challenges and Applications
Author : Saurabh Sharma saurabhsharma5@yahoo.com
Co-Author : Abhishek Gupta abhi.gupta18@yahoo.com
Abstract: Wireless sensor and actor networks
(WSAN) refer to a group of sensors and actors
linked by wireless medium to perform distributed
sensing and acting tasks. The realization of
wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs)
needs to satisfy the requirements introduced by
the coexistence of sensors and actors. In WSANs,
sensors gather information about the physical
world, while actors take decisions and then
perform appropriate actions upon the
environment, which allows a user to effectively
sense and act from a distance.They are currently
receiving significant attention due to their
unlimited potential. However, it is still very early
in the lifetime of such systems. These networks
combine simple wireless communication, minimal
computation facilities, and some sort of sensing of
the physical environment in to a new form of
network that can be deeply embedded in our
physical environment, fueled by the low cost and
the wireless communication facilities. In this
paper we study the opportunities of commercial
exploitation of applications based on sensor
networks.Such applications are quite famous
nowadays in many different domains of everyday
life (e.g.,healthmonitoring,trafficmonitoring).We
concentrate major research challenges for
wireless sensor networks.We also did a brief
mention of a number of other research challenges
that must be met before WSN become
pervasive.We also look at the various applications
of these WSN like traffic managements , health
control and light control etc.
1. INTRODUCTION
In recent years, advances in miniaturization;
lowpower circuit design; simple, low power, yet
reasonably efficient wireless communication
equipment; and improved smallscale energy
supplies have combined with reduced
manufacturing costs to make a new technological
vision possible: Wireless sensor networks. These
networks combine simple wireless
communication, minimal computation facilities,
and some sort of sensing of the physical
environment into a new form of network that can
be deeply embedded in our physical environment,
fueled by the low cost and the wireless
communication facilities. Typical sensing tasks for
such a device could be temperature, light,
vibration, sound, radiation, etc. The hopedfor size
would be a few cubic millimeters, the target price
range less than one US$, including radio front end,
microcontroller, power supply and the actual
sensor. All these components together in a single
device form a socalled sensornode. While these
networks of sensor nodes share many
commonalities with existing ad hoc network
concepts, there are also a number of very
differences and specific challenges.
2. APPLICATIONS
2.1 TrafficManagementSystem
Wireless magnetic sensor networks offer a very
attractive, lowcost alternative to current
technologies such as inductive loops, video
cameras and radar for traffic measurement in
freeways, urban street intersections and presence
detection in parking lots
Some facts on traffic congestion
a. Total amount of delay: 3.7 billion hours in
2003.
b. Wasted fuel: 2.3 billion gallons lost.
c. Congestion cost: $63 billion
From the above data [1] it becomes imperative to
find out a proper solution to this traffic congestion
in big metropolitan cities. One disadvantage of
most conventional vehicle detection methods in a
traffic control system is that they can only detect
the vehicle in a fixed position. This paper
proposed a new vehicle detection method using
the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technology.
The striking feature of the proposed WSNbased
method is that it can monitor the vehicles
dynamically.
MajorCausesofCongestion
Bottlenecks:
a. Intersections of onramps and main roads.
b. Blockage due to obstacles.
approaches (marked as N,S, Wand E) leading to
the intersection and each approach has three lanes
in the incoming direction, which are turnleft (L),
goforward (F) and turnright (R) respectively. In
the following discussion, we use variable? To
denote the approach? € {E, S, N, W, and variable?
to denote the direction of turning? € {L, F, R}.
Thus, a lane where a vehicle is running can be
determined by a pair of {?,? } .In Fig. 4, the dotted
turnright arrow means that if there is a sky pass or
an underpass for pedestrians and cyclists, or
pedestrians and cyclists are not crowded, right turn
is permitted. However, in order to make the
discussion simple, we assume that right turn is
permitted at all time.
Figure1:Fourphasesofsignallight
2.2 ForLightMonitoringandControlApplication
The sensing aspect of WSAN is relatively well
studied and there are a few large scale test bed
deployments for in building sensing and
monitoring. The EYES group from TU Berlin
[2] has instrumented an office building with a
WSN that consists of more than 100 Infineon
nodes and covers 50 rooms. Its current testbed
only has sensing capability.
 Figure2:Lightmonitoringandcontrol
casestudyFigure 2 shows the
schematic for the case study setup consisting of 6
to 8 light sensing nodes and a few actuator nodes
that are connected to dimmers. The nodes
deployed are the Infineon EYES. Sensing and
actuation are implemented as separate networks,
joined at a central gateway, with distinct protocols
and addressing schemes. The sensing network
runs publish/subscribe protocol that does not
address individual sensors directly. A sample
subscription is “sensors of which light readings
are higher than 4000”, or “sensors located in the
living room”. The actuators run a more
conventional pointtopoint addressing protocol.
The gateway server provides internetworking with
the AN space and handles service requests by the
users via ANenabled Personal Digital Assistants
(PDA).
2.3 Intelligentcarparkmanagementsystem:The
architecture of this system, as shown in Figure 3,
illustrates the relationship between the sensor
network, MOTEVIEW, PosgreSQL database,
TinyOS, CarRecord database, and the car park
application. The sensor nodes can be deployed to a
car parking field and collect the realtime
occupation information and vehicle information.
The collected information can be transmitted to a
gateway via wireless communication among the
sensor nodes. The gateway is connected to a
database server via Internet. The collected
information will be acquired and installed into a
database by a database server. The car park
management application operates on top of the
database. This architecture can effectively
decouple the upper layer application from the
underlying wireless sensor networks.
Figure3:Thearchitectureofoursystem
3.
RESEARCHCHALLENGESPhysicalCharacteristi
csofWSANs
In WSANs, the roles of sensor and actor nodes are
to collect data from the environment and perform
appropriate actions based on this collected data,
respectively. Thus, as shown below. These nodes
are scattered in the sensor/actor field while the
sink monitors the overall network and
communicates with the task manager node and
sensor/actor nodes.
1REALWORLDPROTOCOLS:Many current
WSN solutions are developed with simplifying
assumptions about wireless communication and
the environment, even though the realities of
wireless communication and environmental
sensing are well known. Many of these solutions
work very well in simulation. It is either unknown
how the solutions work in the real world or they
can be shown to work poorly in practice. We note
that, in general, there is an excellent understanding
of both the theoretical and practical issues related
to wireless communication.
Discussion/Newresearchisneededto
1. Measure and assess how the theoretical
properties of wireless communication are
exhibited in today’s and tomorrow’s sensing
and communication devices.
1Establish better models of communication
realities to feed back into improved simulation
tools.
2Invent new network protocols that account for
the communication realities of real world
environments.
3Test the individual solutions on real platforms in
real world settings, and Synthesize novel solutions
into a complete systemwide protocol stack for a
real application.
4Establishing higherlevel (more abstract) models
that is suitable for approximate (probabilistic or
stochastic) reasoning and simulation, ideally with
mathematically rigorous relationships to the
detailed designs.
5Verifying (with automated proof and/or
odelchecking) properties of both detailed and
highlevel models
RealTime
WSN deal with real world environments. In any
cases, sensor data must be delivered within time
constraints so that appropriate observations can be
made or actions taken. Very few results exist to
date regarding meeting realtime requirements in
WSN. Most protocols either ignore realtime or
simply attempt to process as fast as possible and
hope that this speed is sufficient to meet deadlines.
PowerManagement
Wireless sensor networks are typically battery
operated, which means that they are also energy
constrained. The lifetime of a sensor network
depends highly on the power consumption
performed at each sensor node. To maximize
wireless sensor networks lifetime, the problem of
energy efficiency needs to be tackled on all levels
of the entire network. Many researchers have been
devoted to reducing power consumption in various
aspects of hardware design, data processing,
network protocols and operating system Limited
processor bandwidth and small memory are two
arguable constraints in sensor networks, which
will disappear with the development of fabrication
techniques. However, the energy constraint is
unlikely to be solved soon due to slow progress in
developing battery capacity. Moreover, the
untended nature of sensor nodes Based on the fact
that individual sensor nodes are not reliable and
subject to failure and single sensing readings can
be easily distorted by background noise and cause
false alarms, it is simply not sufficient to rely on a
single sensor to safeguard a critical area.
ProgrammingAbstractions:
A key to the growth of WSN is raising the level
of abstraction for programmers. Currently,
programmers deal with too many low levels
details regarding sensing and node to node
communication. Current research in programming
abstractions for WSN can be categorized into 7
areas: environmental, middleware APIs, database
centric, event based, virtual machines, scripts and
componentbased. WSN deal primarily with
collecting, analyzing and acting on data, a
database view of such systems is popular. In this
view, a programmer deals with queries written in
an SQLlike format.
SecurityThreats
We have identified different challenges in
providing security to a WSN deployment
The first challenge: there is a conflicting Interest
between minimization of resource consumption
and maximization of security level. A better
solution actually gives a good compromise
between these two. During the design of any
security solution we need to take care of following
resource constraints limited energy, limited
memory, limited computing power, limited
communication bandwidth, limited
communication range.
The second challenge: The communication in
WSN is through wireless media, mainly radio.
This characteristic of WSN makes wire based
security scheme impractical for a WSN.
The third challenge: The type of security
mechanism that can be hosted on a sensor node
platform is dependent on the capabilities and
constraints of sensor node network.
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