Tutorial 8: Wireless Sensor Networks: From Theory to Practice

Wireless sensor networks combine distributed sensing, computing, and wireless communications into a Powerful technology that offers unprecedented resolution, unobtrusiveness, and autonomous operation for countless applications. At the same time, they offer numerous challenges, in particular the strict energy constraints, the distributed operation, and the scalability. This tutorial provides a comprehensive and self-contained introduction to wireless sensor networks, covering all the relevant aspects from the basic theory to real-world applications. It consists of four parts: 1. Introduction: Motivation, relevance, and important applications 2. Challenges and solutions: Difference to other wireless networks; modelling issues; energy-efficient network protocols; performance limits and quality-of-service issues 3. Practical aspects: Hardware overview; experimental results and measurements. 4. Conclusions and outlook.