A Survey of Sensor Network Applications and Architectural Components

Wireless sensor networks have always been designed for monitoring physical environments and reporting the obtained data to a central collection point, called base station (or sink), to analyze them. This type of network consists of tiny, batterypowered devices, called sensor nodes, which are able to store and process data, and communicate results to the external world. It is well known that wireless sensor networks can be used for a wide variety of applications dealing with monitoring control, and surveillance. In this paper, we propose a classification of applications of wireless sensor networks based on their application domains. Precisely, we focus on five application domains, namely healthcare, agriculture, environmental, industry, and military. For each application domain, we give an overview of a variety of applications of wireless sensor networks. Moreover, we describe the main hardware and software components that are essential for the design and development of this type of network.

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