Introducing wireless sensor and actuator networks

WSANs are generally controlled by a DG (also referred to as sinks or base stations). Mostly, WSANs are deployed in remote or obscure locations where they aren’t mains powered, which necessitates the need to employ aggressive energy optimization techniques (inducing regular sleeping/waking cycles and minimizing the data communication) so that batteries can last for a longer duration (unless energy is harvested from the environment, such as solar/vibrational energy).

Another desired property from WSANs is the ability to add or remove nodes (sensors or actuators) without impacting the overall performance of the WSAN. To achieve this, nodes need to be designed intelligently whereby they can dynamically route data packets with any change in network topology. Typically, this is achieved by following a distributed architecture whereby each node acts independently and maintains the information about its nearest neighboring node. WSANs...