Design and application of sink node for wireless sensor network

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present one type of the architecture for wireless sensor network and to discuss in detail the hardware design of the sink node which can be responsible for transmission data or instructions between sensor nodes and data. Finally, an experiment based on wireless sensor network has proved that the design of sink node is applicable and reliable in monitoring environmental elements such as temperature, humidity, etc.Design/methodology/approachA design for the sink node is presented which constants three parts: the power module, the storage/display module and the communication module. Zigbee, GPRS and Ethernet techniques are used on ARM7 microcontroller. The sink node is capable of bridging the user's terminal with sensor nodes for information transmission.FindingsIn this paper, a new method of the power management based on wireless sensor network is proposed to conserve energy. The antenna height is proven to be an important factor to the communicating among nodes. Finally, the paper proposes regular patterns of the deployment for sensor nodes based on the communication range and the sampling range.Originality/valueThe experiment for providing real‐time data on environment monitoring parameters indicates that the system is efficient. The authors believe that the idea and the design presented in the paper may help the research and application of wireless sensor network.