Author : Mahak

Wireless sensor networks are a trend of the past few years and emerging field of wireless sensor networks combines sensing, computation & communication into a single tiny device. A wireless sensor network is composed of tens or hundreds of spatially distributed autonomous nodes called sensors. A wireless sensor network consists of spatially distributed autonomous sensors to monitor physical or environmental conditions such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure, motion or pollutants and to cooperatively pass their data through the network to a main location. This paper describes basic concepts and various applications such as area monitoring, environmental and health care applications etc. Then, discuss the wireless sensor node architecture and also describes architecture of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Finally discuss the various research challenges in wireless sensor networks like fault tolerance, energy saving algorithms, location discovery and security.

Keywords: Ad-hoc networks, wireless senor network architecture, WSNs applications, Design issues in WSNs.