What are Wireless Sensor Networks?

This chapter introduces wireless sensor networks (WSN), what are they as well as what types and applications exist. WSN consist of a few to thousands of sensor nodes, often also referred to as nodes or sensors, which sensor nodes are connected to each other via wireless communications. There are several assumptions or general properties of WSNs, which make them different from other types of wireless networks. There are many different applications of wireless sensor networks around the world making it impossible to cover all their application areas in the book. Applications of wireless sensor networks span environmental and animal monitoring, factory and industrial monitoring, agricultural monitoring and automation, health monitoring and many other areas. One of the main characteristics of wireless sensor networks is that they are tightly coupled with their application. The chapter explores the types of the WSN such as cyber‐physical system (CPS), body sensor networks.