Monday, October 13, 2008

Wireless Sensor Network

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
a
pplications, home automation, and traffic control.

While the term wireless network may technically be used to refer to any type of
computer network that is wireless,the term is most commonly used to refer to a telecommunications network whose interconnections between nodes is implemented without the use of wires, such as a computer network (which is a type of communications network). Wireless telecommunications networks are generally implemented with some type of remote information transmission system that uses electromagnetic waves,such as radio waves,for the carrier and this implementation usually takes place at the physical level or "layer" of the network.