Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs)
A Wireless sensor network can be defined as a network of devices that can communicate the information gathered from a monitored field through wireless links. The data is forwarded through multiple nodes, and with a gateway, the data is connected to other networks like wireless Ethernet.
WSN is a wireless network that consists of base stations and numbers of nodes (wireless sensors).These networks are used to monitor physical or environmental conditions like sound, pressure, temperature and co-operatively pass data through the network to a main location as shown in the figure.
WSN Network Topologies
For radio communication networks, the structure of a WSN includes various topologies like the ones given below.
Star Topologies
Star topology is a communication topology, where each node connects directly to a gateway. A single gateway can send or receive a message to a number of remote nodes. In star topologies, the nodes are not permitted to send messages to each other. This allows low-latency communications between the remote node and the gateway (base station).
Due to its dependency on a single node to manage the network, the gateway must be within the radio transmission range of all the individual nodes. The advantage includes the ability to keep the remote nodes’ power consumption to a minimum and simply under control. The size of the network depends on the number of connections made to the hub.
Tree Topologies
Tree topology is also called as cascaded star topology. In tree topologies, each node connects to a node that is placed higher in the tree, and then to the gateway. The main advantage of the tree topology is that the expansion of a network can be easily possible, and also error detection becomes easy. The disadvantage with this network is that it relies heavily on the bus cable; if it breaks, all the network will collapse.
