What is WSN?

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of spatially distributed autonomous sensors to monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure,motion or pollutants and to cooperatively pass their data through the network to a main location Application Physical security for military operations Indoor/Outdoor Environmental monitoring Seismic and structural monitoring Industrial automation Bio-medical applications Health and Wellness Monitoring Inventory Location Awareness Future consumer applications, including smart homes

Characteristics Power consumption constrains for nodes using batteries or energy harvesting Ability to cope with node failures Mobility of nodes Dynamic network topology Communication failures Heterogeneity of nodes Scalability to large scale of deployment Ability to withstand harsh environmental conditions Easy of use Unattended operation. Difference between MANET and WSN MANETs are usually close to humans, in the sense that most nodes in the network aredevices that are meant to be used by human beings (e.g., laptop computers,PDAs,mobile radio terminals, etc.); conversely, sensor networks do not focus on humaninteraction but instead focus on interaction with the environment The number of nodes in sensor networks, as well as the density of deployment , can be orders of magnitude higher than in ad hoc networks as the nodes in a sensor network areusually embedded in the environment to sense some phenomenon and possibly actuateupon it. Terms such as unicast and multicast common in MANETs, are hardly applicable in WSNwhere we find other forms of routing such as one-to-many, many-to-one, many-tomany,etc.

The network size is case of a MANET depends upon no. of active users present in the

Deployment area. But in WSNs the no. of nodes depends upon the extension of the observed area, characteristics of nodes and on required redundancy The traffic in MANETs are generally going to be higher owing to the use of well knownservices like Web, mail, video etc but in case of WSNs the data rate is low over a large period of time as WSNs interact with surrounding environment.

In case of WSNs the sensor nodes are state of art computationdevices (Laptop or a PDA) where as in case of WSNs nodes are of simple and cheap elements implementing efficient algorithms.

WSNs are conceivable with different network densities, from very densedeployments which will require different or least adaptive protocols. This diversity although present, is not as quite large in MANETs.

sparse

to

In both MANETs and WSNs energy is a scarce recourse. But WSNs have tighter requirements on network lifetime, and recharging or replacing WSNs node batteries ismuch less an option then in MANETs. Owing to this, the impact of energy considerations on the entire system architecture is much deeper in WSNs than in MANETs.

The QoS services in a MANET is traditionally dictated by traditional applications (low jitter for voice applications) but for WSNs entirely new QoS is requires which also takes energy explicitly into account. Redundant deployment makes data centric protocol very important in case of WSNs which is irrelevant and alien in case of MANETs. MANETs uses public key cryptography for security purposes but WSNs use Symmetric key cryptography. Most nodes on WSNs applications have stationary nodes compares to MANETs. WSNs are smaller, more powerful and more memory constrained compared to MANETs.

Routing in MANETs support any node pairs, some source routing and distance vector protocols incur heavy control traffic but WSNs support specialized traffic pattern as they cannot afford to have too many node states and packet overhead.

WSNs nodes are mostly prone to failure because of mobility as some WSN nodes requires mobility compared to MANETs. The main purpose of MANET is distributed computing but W SNs are used for information gathering. Similarities between MANET and WSN Both are Distributed Wireless network infrastructure in place. networks that is there is not a significant

Routing between two nodes may involve the use of intermediate relay nodes also known as Multihop Routing

Both Ad hoc and sensor nodes are usually battery-powered and therefore there is a bigconcern on minimizing power consumption.

Both networks use a wireless channel placed in an unlicensed spectrum that is prone tointerference by other radio technologies operating in the same frequency. Self-management is necessary because of the distributed nature of both networks