Wireless sensor networks - part I: topology and design issues

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have a wide range of invaluable civil and military applications. Nodes in WSNs act as information sources, sensing and collecting data samples from their environment. They perform routing functions, creating multi-hop wireless networking fabric that conveys data samples to other sensor nodes. A number of important performance measures have to be considered in designing WSN. Among these, energy efficiency and adaptive medium access control (MAC) and scalability. In part I of this series, we review a number of topologies and design techniques used in the deployment of WSNs. In particular, we cover the star, mesh and hybrid topologies. Factors influencing the design of WSNs include power consumption, scalability, operating environment, transmission media, fault tolerance/reliability, and topology changes. We also present a number of WSNs communication architectures