Wireless Sensor Networks

Recent technological advances led to the development of very small and low-cost sensor devices with computational, processing, data storage and communicational capabilities. These devices, called wireless sensor nodes, when deployed in an area (indoors or outdoors) form a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). The initial development of WSN was motivated by military applications such as enemy detection, battlefield surveillance, etc. As years went by, considerable amounts of research efforts have enabled the actual implementation and deployment of sensor networks tailored to the unique requirements of certain sensing and monitoring applications. Nowadays WSNs are a very promising tool of monitoring events and are used in many other fields, such as agriculture, environmental monitoring of air-water pollution, greenhouse, health monitoring, structural monitoring and more. Given the benefits offered by WSNs compared to wired networks, such as, simple deployment, low installation cost, lack of cabling, and high mobility, WSNs present an appealing technology as a smart infrastructure for building and factory automation, and process control applications.