Wireless Sensor Node

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of autonomous devices with inbuilt sensors for monitoring various environmental and physical conditions at various places and times. These devices have traditionally been networked using the IEEE 802.15.4 standard as the base with standards like Zigbee, 6LoWPAN, WirelessHART, etc., forming the upper layers. These standards have served well the primary requirement of Wireless Sensor Nodes – a long battery life. However, they have their drawbacks - they offer limited range and throughput, they are less secure, they need special infrastructure so that they can be integrated into the existing LAN and they are affected by an already existing WLAN since they use the same frequency band. Wi-Fi addresses these issues effectively and WSN’s have started using 802.11b/g as the networking standard. But the RS9110-N-11-31, which is the industry’s first single-stream 802.11n module designed specially for WSN’s, offers the best solution. It has an ultra-low power microcontroller which interfaces with various sensors and Redpine’s WLAN subsystem. The system-level and profile driven fine-grained power control offers a battery life of over 3 years over the IPv6 framework. It offers a higher range through STBC and also higher throughputs which result in lesser “awake” periods, thus reducing power consumption substantially. The RS9110-N-11-31 supports TCP/UDP over IPv6/IPv4, making it extremely easy to integrate into an already existing WLAN. It supports configuration over UART as well as Wi-Fi and offers digital and analog interfaces to work with a variety of sensors.