Feasibility Study of Wireless Sensor Network

Description

The strength of a wireless sensor network is the ability to provide wireless connectivity tospatially distributed autonomous devices. The mesh capability allows the deployment of alarge numbers of distributed nodes. A gateway may be necessary to connect wireless nodesto the internet. The wireless protocols typically are based on IEEE 802.15.4 or IEEE 802.11(Wi-Fi) standards. Other proprietary protocols may also be adopted with a physical layeroperated at 900 MHz or 2.4 GHz.The WSN is typically scalable - a network size can be as large as thousands of nodes.ZigBee is getting more acceptance recently and starts gaining momentum since it providesa robust wireless two-way communication, secure and yet scalable. In general, the basicsystem consists of a radio transceiver, an antenna (microcontroller and power amplifier areoptional). The salient feature of mesh networking physically connects the wireless devicesso that messages can be routed to the destination irrespective of the geometry and terrain ofthe area of interest. The mesh concept also allows the interference to be bypassed sincegeneric available nodes in the vicinity of interference may take care of the interfered nodes.Thus good connectivity can be assured. In general, the network size and the cost constraintsof sensor nodes will determine the corresponding constraints on resources such as energy,memory, computational speed and communications bandwidth. Applications may typicallyinclude, but not limited to, the followings:-Health care monitoring-Air pollution monitoring-Area monitoring-Water quality monitoring-Energy applications-Home/building automation-Energy management-Smart MeteringThe aim of this project is to investigate the feasibility of some of the captioned applications,in particular smart metering.