Building Wireless Sensor Networks

3Information Gathering

3.1 Introduction

The importance of a wireless sensor network lies in its ability to sense an event and propagate the sensed data to the sink through a multi-hop network. In a typical wireless network like WiFi or a cellular network, nodes directly communicate with the nearest high-power control tower or base station. However, in a wireless sensor network, sensor nodes communicate only with their local peers. Thus, instead of relying on a pre-deployed infrastructure, each individual sensor node becomes part of the overall infrastructure. This enables the sensor network to spread over a large geographical area. In a cellular network, services may be denied when too many cell phones are active in a small area. In contrast, ...