General Introduction for WSN and its Topologies

1. 1 Applications of Wireless Sensor Networks
Various fields of applications of wireless sensor networks are :
• Environment Monitoring
• Acoustic Detection
• Seismic Detection
• Military Surveillance
• Inventory Tracking
• Medical Monitoring
• Smart Spaces
• Process Monitoring
• Green House Monitoring
• Landslide Detection
• Machine Health Monitoring
• Water Monitoring
• Agriculture Sector
• Medical Sector
1.1 Advantages of WSN
Advantages of WSN are :
• Implementation cost is cheaper than wired network.
• Ideal for temporary network setups.
• Ideal for the non reachable such as across river or mountains or rural
areas.
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2. 1.2 Disadvantages of WSN
Various disadvantages of WSN are :
• Lower speed compared to wired network.
• Less secure because hacker’s laptop can act as acess point.
• More complex to configure than wired network.
• Can be affected by surrounding’s. For example, walls(blocking), mi-
crowave oven(interference), far distance.
• Sensor node has low battery power, so as battery goes down, node
goes down and so does the whole network.
2 Advantages and Disadvantages of Sensor Net-
work Topology
All topologies have various advantages and disadvantages :
• Ring : In this topology, one node failure causes whole network failure
and also messages can travel only in one direction.
Advantage is that each node is equal and no node is leader.
• Star : In this topology, if hub is damaged the whole network is dam-
aged.
Advantage is that if one node is cut of there is no effect on another
node.
• Bus : In this topology, there is no retransmitting capacity for each
node.
Advantage is that it is very simple to implement.
• Tree : In this topology, if root node is damaged then whole network is
damaged.
Advantage is that we can add priority according to structure or posi-
tion of nodes.
• Fully Connected : In this topology, implementation is difficult and
also routing problem is there if there is increase in network.
Advantage is that direct communication is achievable and all nodes
are identical.
• Mesh : In this topology, it can only be expanded with the same number
of nodes in both direction as it is having a square relation between the
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3. nodes.
Advantage is that all nodes have equal priority and are identical. If
one node is damaged another node takes on the responsibility. It is
good for large scale network over a geographical region.
3 Conclusion
Wireless sensor networks already has huge application in various sec-
tors and fields inspite of some limitations one of which is ’low battery
power capacity’ which is also its main drawback. Still its applications
are increasing day by day. Also a thing to keep a check on in sensors
applications is its topology. We have various options and every topol-
ogy is having Pros and Cons.
The applications of WSN will increase in near future and its draw-
backs will hopefully reduce significantly as lot of research is goin on
both internationally and at domestic level in this field.
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