Wireless sensor networks

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a wireless network consisting of spatially distributed autonomous devices using sensors to cooperatively monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure, motion or pollutants, at different locations. The development of wireless sensor networks was originally motivated by military applications such as battlefield surveillance. However, wireless sensor networks are now used in many civilian application areas, including environment and habitat monitoring, healthcare applications, home automation, and traffic control.

Sensor node (mote)

A sensor node, also known as a mote (chiefly in North America), is a node in a wireless sensor network that is capable of performing some processing, gathering sensory information and communicating with other connected nodes in the network.
The most widely used and one of the cheapest mote/sensor nodes are MICAZ motes. The MICAZ motes are used in low-power, wireless, sensor networks which are based on AVR “ATmega128” Microcontroller (Microcontroller is a tiny processor).


Contiki Operating System

Contiki is a tiny, open source, highly portable, multi-tasking operating system for memory-constrained networked embedded systems written by Dr. Adam Dunkels, an experimental computer scientist of the Networked Embedded Systems Group at Computer Systems Laboratory of the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Kista, Sweden.
Its features Include full TCP/IP networking through uIP (micro-IP), a graphical (GUI) subsystem, VNC server, world's smallest web browser, etc. Contiki also consists of an event-driven kernel on top of which application programs are dynamically loaded and unloaded at runtime. Contiki is an appropriate operating system for using in the sensor network arena.

Posted by K.C. Hewage at 10:07 PM  
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