Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN)
Wireless sensor networks have been applied to many applications since emerging. Among them, one of the most important applications is sensor data collection, where sensed data are continuously collected at all or some of the sensor nodes and forwarded through wireless communications to a central base station for further processing. In a WSN, each sensor node is powered by a battery and uses wireless communications. This results in the small size of a sensor node and makes it easy to be attached to any location with little disturbances to the surrounding environment. Such flexibility greatly eases the costs and efforts for deployment and maintenance and makes wireless sensor network a competitive approach for sensor data collection comparing with its wired counterpart. In fact, a wide range of real-world deployments has been witnessed in the past few years.
Wireless vs Wired Sensor Networks
In a Wireless Sensor Network, the lifetime of a sensor node is constrained by the battery attached on it, and the network lifetime, in turn, depends on the lifetime of sensor nodes whereas these shortcomings are of least importance in Wired Sensor Networks. Furthermore, Wireless Sensor Networks are compact in size, flexible and can be easily deployed. Low cost and Maintenance is an added advantage of the Wireless compared to the Wired Sensor Networks. There is no collision between the message packets in Wired Sensor Networks. In fact, a wide range of real-world deployments has been witnessed in the past few years. Examples are across wildlife habitat monitoring, environmental research, volcano monitoring, water monitoring, civil engineering and wildland fire forecast/detection are the few application where Wired Sensor Networks can be seldom used.
In this seminar report, we presented an in-depth survey on recent advances in networked wireless sensor data collection. Specifically, we first highlighted the special features of sensor data collection in WSNs, by comparing it with both wired sensor data collection networks and other applications using WSNs. Bearing these features in mind, we discussed issues on using WSNs for sensor data collection, which in general can be broken into the deployment stage, the control message dissemination stage and the data delivery stage. Although these stages have their own issues to address, it has been shown that by considering them jointly, better performance can be achieved. Low duty-cycle is considered as an effective way to extend the network lifetime of a WSN, yet an interesting topic is to explore how its utilization in networked wireless sensor data collection interacts with other design issues; and another direction is to further optimize the system performance by combining the designs of the deployment, data delivery and control message dissemination stages together.
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