A Comparative Study on Hardware Platforms for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Recently, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) attract a great deal of research attention, and are envisioned to support a variety of applications, including building monitoring, environment control, wild-life habitat monitoring, forest fire detection, industry automation, military, security, and health-care. Over the years, we have seen a variety of hardware platforms for WSNs to facilitate developing WSN applications. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of existing hardware platforms for WSNs. We first present the hardware architecture of a wireless sensor node. We then survey the major hardware platforms for WSNs and present a comparison of these hardware platforms. Finally we present some recommendations from the perspectives of hardware platform developers and hardware platform users. The authors hope that making information about existing hardware platforms will assist researchers working in this area to appreciate the diversity of platforms available to them and to help them select the most appropriate platform for their purposes.