Wireless Sensor NetworksIn today’s demanding and competitive business environment, the need to collect, interpret and act on real-time data plays an increasingly vital role. But data collection using typical wired sensor networks has always been expensive to install and maintain, and limited in its reach. At the same time, the promise of a wireless solution has been elusive because of problems with reliability, power consumption, and the costs and complexity of network installation and expansion. Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a term used to describe an emerging class of embedded communication products that provide redundant, fault-tolerant wireless connections between sensors, actuators and controllers. WSNs provide performance above and beyond legacy point-to-point solutions; particularly in areas of fault tolerance, power consumption and installation cost.
While wireless provides clear advantages in cost and flexibility, it brings along a host of challenges. In particular, point-to-point radio communication links are notoriously variable and unpredictable. A link that is strong today may be weak tomorrow due to environmental conditions, new obstacles, unanticipated interferers and myriad other factors. Wireless challenges typically show up as one of three major failure modes: RF interference, changes in the physical environment that block communication links, and loss of individual network nodes. Any of these issues will bring down a point-to-point wireless link. With a network architecture designed to protect against these issues, the network can isolate individual points of failure and eliminate their impact, allowing the network as a whole to maintain very high end-to end reliability. Similarly, a well-designed wireless network architecture will transparently adapt to changing environments, allowing long-term operation with minimal maintenance or tuning. |
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