Wireless sensor networks and their routing protocols (1)

With the development of sensor technology, embedded technology, distributed information processing technology, and wireless communication technology, wireless sensor networks (WSN) composed of a large number of micro-sensor nodes with micro-processing capabilities have gradually become a hot issue in the academic field.

The US Business Weekly and MIT technology comments listed wireless sensor networks as one of the most influential technologies in the 21st century and one of the technologies that change the world in their reports on predicting future technological developments. Compared with Ad Hoc networks in traditional wireless communication networks, the self-organizing, dynamic, reliable, and data-centric features of WSN allow them to be applied to areas inaccessible to personnel, such as battlefields, desert. Therefore, we can conclude that wireless sensor networks in the future will have a broader prospect.

Wireless Sensor Network Architecture

Wireless Sensor Network Architecture [1] 1. sensor networks generally include sensor nodes, aggregation nodes, and management nodes. Sensor nodes are randomly distributed in a monitoring area. nodes form a network in the form of self-organization, and the monitoring data is transmitted to the aggregation node through multi-hop relay, finally, the monitoring information is transmitted to the management node through the Internet or other network communication methods. Similarly, you can publish commands on management nodes to inform sensor nodes to collect monitoring information.

Figure 1 Wireless Sensor Network Architecture

A sensor node Is A microsystem with information collection and processing capabilities. It integrates sensor modules, information processing modules, wireless communication modules, and energy supply modules. Its architecture 2 is shown in.

Figure 2 sensor node architecture

The sensor module is responsible for collecting and transforming information in the monitoring area. The information processing module is responsible for managing the entire sensor node, storing and processing the data collected by itself or the data sent by other nodes, the wireless communication module communicates with other sensor nodes, and the energy supply module supplies energy for the operation of the entire sensor network.

The energy supply of sensor nodes is battery, and the node energy is limited. Consider extending the life cycle of the entire sensor network as much as possible. When designing sensor nodes, ensuring the continuity of energy supply is an important design principle. Sensor node energy consumption modules mainly include sensor modules, information processing modules, and wireless communication modules. The vast majority of energy consumption is concentrated in wireless communication modules, it accounts for about 80% of the energy consumption of the entire sensor node. Therefore, the proposed sensor node communication routing protocol is designed to reduce energy consumption and prolong the network life cycle.

In a wireless sensor network, the routing protocol not only cares about the energy consumption of a single node, but also the balanced energy consumption of the entire network, so as to prolong the lifetime of the entire network. At the same time, the wireless sensor network is data-centric, which is the most prominent in the routing protocol. Each node does not need to adopt a unified network-wide addressing, you do not need to select a path based on the node's addressing. Instead, you need to create a forwarding path between the data source and the aggregation node based on the data you are interested in. At present, many types of sensor network routing protocols are proposed based on the above purpose.