Wireless Sensor Network Using ARM Processors

Abstract

The hardware design of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is the crux of its effective deployment. Nowadays these networks are used in microscopic, secure and high-end embedded products. WSN's potentiality in terms of efficient data sensing and distributed data processing has led to its usage in applications for measurement and tracking. WSN comprises of small number of embedded devices known as sensor nodes, gateways and base stations. Sensor nodes consist of sensors, processors and transceivers. The property of embedded sensor devices, also called motes, is to determine the strength of WSN. Thus processor selection for the motes plays a critical role in determining a WSN's competency. In this article, the absolute and obvious hardware characteristics of available and proposed sensor nodes are discussed. The objective of this work was to increase the efficiency and provision of sensor nodes by evaluating their processing and transceiver units. During this work, a sensor node was developed with ARM processor and XBee series 2 Unit. LPC 2148, LPC 2378 ARM processors were posed as processing unit and XBee series 2 acted as communication unit. Results of this experimental setup were recorded. Also a comparative study of the various available sensor nodes and proposed sensor nodes was done extensively.