Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)

Last Updated: April 25, 2013

Definition - What does Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) mean?

Wireless sensor network (WSN) refers to a group of spatially dispersed and dedicated sensors for monitoring and recording the physical conditions of the environment and organizing the collected data at a central location. WSNs measure environmental conditions like temperature, sound, pollution levels, humidity, wind speed and direction, pressure, etc.

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Techopedia explains Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)

WSNs were initially designed to facilitate military operations but its application has since been extended to health, traffic, and many other consumer and industrial areas. A WSN consists of anywhere from a few hundreds to thousands of sensor nodes. The sensor node equipment includes a radio transceiver along with an antenna, a microcontroller, an interfacing electronic circuit, and an energy source, usually a battery. The size of the sensor nodes can also range from the size of a shoe box to as small as the size of a grain of dust. As such, their prices also vary from a few pennies to hundreds of dollars depending on the functionality parameters of a sensor like energy consumption, computational speed rate, bandwidth, and memory.