Sensor Networks Overview

Sensor networks pose a unique set of challenges. The requirement for low bandwidth, energy aware sensor networks with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of nodes exists in both military and civilian markets.

Commercially, sensors may be used to monitor oil pipelines and production facilities, residential electricity usage, pharmaceutical testing and manufacturing, etc.

Military and Homeland Defense applications include sensing chemical and biological weapons, weapons fire, forest fires and troop and material movements.

These applications need sensors that can last a long time without battery replacement, provide easy data collection and extraction and can organize without operator intervention.

low bandwidth wireless sensors

The OrderOne Networks protocol meets these requirements.

Energy Conserving
The OrderOne Networks protocol conserves energy by being very efficient with the data that it broadcasts. Each node need only broadcast one packet of a predefined maximum size every time interval. For example, a node might broadcast one packet of 150 bytes every 20 minutes. Regardless of the network size, the protocol will never use more than this allowance.

Energy Aware
If a node is running low on power; it can adjust its connection weights to shift data traffic away from itself. This process is automatic.

Very Large Network Sizes
None of the mechanisms employed by the OrderOne Networks routing protocol are affected by network size. This enables very large sensor networks. The only limiting factor is the amount of memory available on each sensor node. If each node does not have enough memory then a sprinkling of higher capacity devices should be added to the network. These higher capacity devices will support the lower capacity devices automatically.

This capability allows extremely low capacity devices to be part of a very large network.

Convergence
If hand held or higher capacity devices are using the OrderOne Networks protocol they can seamlessly connect to the sensor network. More broadly, devices of all different capacities and capabilities may be part of the same network. This includes sensors, hand held devices as well as vehicle and fixed devices.

The OrderOne Networks protocol allows very large networks that may contain all types of devices.