Introduction: Bird’s-Eye View of Wireless Sensor Networks - Application and Multidisciplinary Aspects of Wireless Sensor Networks - page 2

Transciever

Sensors...

Microcontroller A/D conversion

Sensors...

External RAM memory

Fig. 1.1 Block diagram of a sensor node

Wireless sensor networks
Tiny units with very small
power consumption
Possibility of geographical
and diffusion routing

Mobile ad-hoc networks
(MANETs)

Wireless LAN

Ad hoc networks
No permanent
infrastructure

Computer networks

Fig. 1.2 Position of sensor networks in the broad context of computer networking

sensor nodes, which route collected data onward to their eventual destination.
For example, a gateway sensor node could be connected to a PC computer, or
an Internet router which could relay the data onward to the final destination
(Fig. 1.3 ).
Limited energy resources of sensor nodes (typically, they only run on battery
power) and the fact that in large-scale deployment of sensor networks, it would be
a major hurdle to replace batteries on nodes which have spent their existing ones,
have important implications: