A survey of applications of wireless sensors and wireless sensor networks (original) (raw)

2005, Intelligent Control, 2005. …

Wireless sensors and wireless sensor networks have come to the forefront of the scientific community recently. This is the consequence of engineering increasingly smaller sized devices, which enable many applications. The use of these sensors and the possibility of organizing them into networks have revealed many research issues and have highlighted new ways to cope with certain problems. In this paper, different applications areas where the use of such sensor networks has been proposed are surveyed. I. INTRODUCTION ECENT research in many scientific areas, like physics, microelectronics, control, material science etc. and the collaboration of scientists which used, traditionally, to work towards totally different directions, has lead to the creation of the Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems, commonly referred to as MEMS [1]. MEMS have succeeded in augmenting the limits of what was considered to be a System-On-a-Chip (SoC). Indeed, MEMS have enabled chips, which were formerly assumed to carry only logic functions, to sense the real word and even to react. Measuring of physical parameters and actuating is now possible via integration of sensors and actuators to silicon. MEMS are not the only part of the silicon industry that has made astonishing strides. RF technology and digital circuits have also progressed spectacularly. Lower power and higher frequency trancievers are implemented on chips, while digital circuits tend to shrink and be fabricated more and more densely. The collaboration and synergy of sensing, processing, communication and actuation is the next step to exploit the inheritance of this new technology. The possibilities and challenges offered by this field both in theory and in