Wireless Sensor Networks and Issues–A Survey

Wireless Sensor Networks have recently come into prominence because they hold the potential to revolutionize many segments of our economy and life, from environmental monitoring and conservation, to manufacturing and business asset management, to automation in the transportation and health-care industries. Wireless Sensor Network is an infrastructure comprised of sensing, computing and communication elements that gives the user the ability to instrument, observe and react to events and phenomena in a specified environment. This networks are self-organized and data centric. The sensor nodes are densely deployed and collaboratively work together to provide higher quality sensing in time and space as compared to traditional stationary sensors. Wireless Sensor Networks promises to provide information that is precisely localized in time and space according to the user’s need or demands, by coupling end users directly to sensor measurements. Wireless Sensor Networks face new challenges for information processing because of its various energy and computational constraints. This paper provides a survey on Wireless Sensor Networks. We discuss the hardware and software components of a sensor node, Topology and Architecture of Wireless Sensor Networks. We attempt to discuss on the major issues of Wireless Sensor Networks.