Hello and Welcome to another episode of “Learn Technology in 5 Minutes” from MAKERDEMY.

In this episode, we will learn about Wireless Sensor Networks and why they are often an important part of an IoT solution. When we want to rapidly prototype IoT solutions, we often use Raspberry Pi, the ESP32 or even the Arduino. This is all fine for prototyping, but real-world deployment is a different ball game altogether. In the real world, there are a variety of constraints. We have constrained networks, we have cost constraints, we may have to make our solution work in harsh environments and so on.

For example, let us consider a smart city project. Such a project may involve deploying several thousands of sensors all over a city spanning an area of several hundred square kilometers. Often, these sensors will have to run on batteries with minimal or zero human assistance. Furthermore, the radio network may have bandwidth and quality constraints. And the project will also most likely have budget constraints.

This is where the Wireless Sensor Networks come in to play. A wireless sensor network comprises a large number of sensor nodes arranged in a variety of topographical configurations like the star, ring, and mesh. These sensor nodes are usually battery or solar operated and are designed to operate on very little power. Often the radio transmission range of these sensor nodes is a few tens of meters, so the network nodes will have to relay the data from sensors all the way to the gateway from where the data can be sent to the cloud via either wired ethernet, cellular or wifi networks. Thus, the data in a wireless sensor network takes a multi-hop path to reach the sink node or the base station.

And what are the benefits of have this sensor network wireless? Well, to start with it is a lot cheaper to build a wireless network rather than wiring up all the sensor nodes. Secondly, with wireless, the sensor network can be configured and reconfigured into various topographies like mesh, star, etc. very easily. Sensor nodes can also be added to and removed from a wireless network a lot easier than a wired network.

Now let us see what are the components of a typical wireless sensor node. The sensor is just one component of a wireless sensor node. Usually, it also has a power supply, a microcontroller, and a radio transceiver.

Put simply, all this data from various sensors in the wireless sensor network, take a multi-hop route to the base station or gateway from where the data is funneled to the cloud IoT platforms like AWS IoT where all this data is cleaned, and analyzed to come with actionable insights.

Typical sensor nodes are used to measure temperature, humidity, vibrations, light, heat, movement, moisture and so on.


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