Prof. Khaled A.
Al Soufy Wireless Network, Electrical Department, 5th Level, 2nd Semester
summer 2024/2025
Lect4: WPAN and WSN
By the end of this lecture, you will be able to:
1. Identify some standers of wireless protocols.
2. Explain the WPAN and Bluetooth.
3. Discuss Wireless Sensor Network.
1. Wireless network protocols and standards
Wireless network protocols and standards are a set of rules and specifications that
define how data is transmitted and received over wireless communication networks.
These protocols govern various aspects of wireless communication, including data
encoding, modulation, transmission methods, security, and network connectivity.
Some key wireless network protocols and standards include:
1. Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11): This family of standards defines wireless local area
network (WLAN) protocols. It includes variations like 802.11a, 802.11b,
802.11g, 802.11n, 802.11ac, and 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E), each
offering different data rates, frequencies, and capabilities.
2. Bluetooth (IEEE 802.15): Bluetooth standards specify protocols for short-
range wireless communication between devices, primarily used for data
exchange over short distances.
3. Cellular Networks (3GPP Standards): These standards, managed by the 3rd
Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), include various generations like 2G
(GSM), 3G (UMTS), 4G (LTE), and 5G, governing mobile telephony and data
communication over cellular networks.
4. NFC (Near Field Communication).
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Prof. Khaled A. Al Soufy Wireless Network, Electrical Department, 5th Level, 2nd Semester
summer 2024/2025
5. Zigbee (IEEE 802.15.4): Zigbee is a low-power, short-range wireless
communication standard used in home automation, industrial control, and
sensor networks.
WPAN: Bluetooth
A Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) is a type of wireless network that
connects devices within a relatively small and localized area, typically within a range
of a few meters to tens of meters.
Characteristics of WPAN:
• Short Range: WPANs operate over short distances, allowing devices near
to communicate with each other. This range limitation ensures that the
network doesn’t interfere with other nearby networks.
• Low Power: Many WPAN technologies are designed to be energy-
efficient, making them suitable for use in devices with limited power
resources like sensors, wearables, and IoT devices.
• Ease of Connectivity: WPANs often utilize simple and user-friendly
connection methods such as pairing or automatic discovery to establish
connections between devices.
Examples of applications are smart Homes, Healthcare, Industrial IoT (IIoT), and
Consumer Electronics.
Bluetooth wireless is a short-range radio technology developed for Personal Area
networks (PAN). This is a different type of network that is needed to connect different
small devices nearby (about 10 m) without expensive wiring or the need for a
wireless infrastructure. Bluetooth is a dynamic standard where devices can
automatically find each other, establish connections, and discover what they can do
for each other on an ad hoc basis. In 2001, the first products hit the mass market, and
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Prof. Khaled A. Al Soufy Wireless Network, Electrical Department, 5th Level, 2nd Semester
summer 2024/2025
many mobile phones, laptops, PDAs, video cameras, etc. are equipped with Bluetooth
technology today.
1. User scenarios
Many different user scenarios can be imagined for wireless piconets or WPANs:
1. Connection of peripheral devices.
2. Support of ad-hoc networking.
3. Bridging of networks.
2. Topology
There are two types of topologies for Bluetooth: – Piconet, and Scatternet.
2.1. The Piconet is a small ad hoc network of devices (normally 8 stations) as
shown in the next figure.
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Prof. Khaled A. Al Soufy Wireless Network, Electrical Department, 5th Level, 2nd Semester
summer 2024/2025
It has the following features:
• One is called Master and the others are called Slaves.
• All slave stations synchronize their clocks with the master.
• Possible communication - One-to-one or one-to-many.
• There may be one station in a parked state.
• Each piconet has a unique hopping pattern/ID.
• Each master can connect to 7 simultaneously (The reason for the upper limit
of eight active devices, is the 3-bit address used in Bluetooth) or 200+ inactive
(parked) slaves per piconet.
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Prof. Khaled A. Al Soufy Wireless Network, Electrical Department, 5th Level, 2nd Semester
summer 2024/2025
From the previous figure: parked devices (P) cannot actively participate in the
piconet (i.e., they do not have a connection), but are known and can be reactivated
within some milliseconds. Devices in stand-by (SB) do not participate in the piconet.
If a parked device wants to communicate and there are already seven active slaves,
one slave has to switch to park mode to allow the parked device to switch to active
mode.
2.2. Scatternet: To improve the efficiency of the piconet, a scatternet is used. By
making one slave as master of another Piconet, Scatternet is formed by
combining several Piconets as shown in the next figure.
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Prof. Khaled A. Al Soufy Wireless Network, Electrical Department, 5th Level, 2nd Semester
summer 2024/2025
3. Bluetooth Architecture
The Bluetooth architecture shows all the major layers in the Bluetooth system and is
depicted in the next figure.
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Prof. Khaled A. Al Soufy Wireless Network, Electrical Department, 5th Level, 2nd Semester
summer 2024/2025
1. Radio layer: This is the lowest layer in the Bluetooth protocol stack. It performs
PHY functions by defining the carrier frequencies and output power. Bluetooth
uses a technique called frequency hopping to establish radio links with other
Bluetooth devices.
2. Baseband Layer: it is responsible for constructing and decoding packets,
encoding and managing error correction, encrypting and decrypting for secure
communications, calculating radio transmission frequency patterns,
maintaining synchronization, controlling the radio, and all of the other low-
level details necessary to realize Bluetooth communications.
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Prof. Khaled A. Al Soufy Wireless Network, Electrical Department, 5th Level, 2nd Semester
summer 2024/2025
3. Link Manager Protocol: LMP is responsible for managing the physical details
of Bluetooth connections. It is responsible for creating the links, monitoring
their health, and terminating them upon command or failure in response to
requests from the logical link control and adaptation layer (L2CAP) above.
4. Logical Link Control and Adaptation Protocol Layer (L2CAP): this layer
establishes, manages, and terminates logical connections for applications. It
takes care of such details as QoS requirements of data, and adaptation of data
between application and baseband formats by providing segmentation and
reassembly.
Wireless Sensor Network
A sensor is a device that can sense and measure a change in the physical
condition of the environment, such as a change in air pressure, temperature, sound,
vibration, motion, etc. It converts a physical attribute into a form understandable by
users.
Each node of the sensor network consists of three subsystems: the sensor subsystem
which senses the environment, the processing subsystem which performs local
computations on the sensed data, and the communication subsystem which is
responsible for message exchange with neighboring sensor nodes.
There are many types of sensors, see the following figure.
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Prof. Khaled A. Al Soufy Wireless Network, Electrical Department, 5th Level, 2nd Semester
summer 2024/2025
1. Wireless sensor network:
The main issue in this course is WSN. It can be defined as a self-configured and
infrastructure-less wireless network 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 or sink where
the data can be observed and analyzed.
2. Characteristics of Sensor Network
The advantages of wireless sensor networks over wired ones are as follows:
1. Ease of deployment.
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Prof. Khaled A. Al Soufy Wireless Network, Electrical Department, 5th Level, 2nd Semester
summer 2024/2025
2. Simple to use.
3. Extended range: One huge wired sensor (microsensor) can be replaced by
smaller wireless sensors for the same cost.
4. Fault Tolerance: failure of one node may not affect the network operation
because alternative sensors are doing the same jobs.
5. Mobility.
6. Implementation pricing is cheap.
3. WSN Applications
Wireless sensor networks have gained considerable popularity due to their flexibility
in solving problems in different application domains and have the potential to change
our lives in many different ways. Some of these applications are:
1. Military applications.
2. Area monitoring: In area monitoring, the sensor nodes are deployed over a
region where some phenomenon is to be monitored.
3. Transportation: Real-time traffic information is being collected by WSNs to
later feed transportation models and alert drivers of congestion and traffic
problems.
4. Health applications.
5. Marine monitoring: Ocean life.
6. Environmental sensing (Forest Fire Detection).
7. Structural monitoring: such as bridges, flyovers, and tunnels.
8. Industrial monitoring.
9. Agricultural sector.
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Prof. Khaled A. Al Soufy Wireless Network, Electrical Department, 5th Level, 2nd Semester
summer 2024/2025
4. Structure of a wireless sensor network
The structure of a Wireless Sensor Network includes different topologies for radio
communications networks.
• Star network (single point-to-multipoint): Star topology is a communication
topology, where each node connects directly to a gateway. A single gateway
can send or receive a message to several remote nodes.
• Tree Topologies: Tree topology is also called a cascaded star topology. In tree
topologies, each node connects to a node that is placed higher in the tree, and
then to the gateway.
• Mesh Topologies: The Mesh topologies allow the transmission of data from
one node to another, which is within its radio transmission range. If a node
wants to send a message to another node, that is out of the radio communication
range, it needs an intermediate node to forward the message to the desired
node.
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Prof. Khaled A. Al Soufy Wireless Network, Electrical Department, 5th Level, 2nd Semester
summer 2024/2025
5. Structure of a wireless sensor node
A sensor node is made up of four basic components as sensing unit, a processing
unit, a transceiver unit and a power unit.
6. Fixed Wireless Sensor Networks
Sensors can be used to measure some prespecified physical parameters by placing
them at fixed locations and linking them by a wireless network to perform distributed
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Prof. Khaled A. Al Soufy Wireless Network, Electrical Department, 5th Level, 2nd Semester
summer 2024/2025
sensing tasks. As these sensors are placed at predefined places, they are very useful
for continuous and regular monitoring.
A general architecture is shown in the next figure. These stationary sensor nodes
typically constitute an ad hoc LAN and possibly communicate to a base station or a
wired backbone for further processing and decision-making. The medium access
using FDMA could
use a CDMA model
or fixed time slots in
TDMA.
7. Wireless Sensor
Network
Architecture
The most common WSN architecture follows the OSI architecture Model. The
architecture of the WSN includes five layers and three cross layers. Mostly in sensor
wireless networks, we require five layers,
namely application, transport, wireless
networks, data link & physical layer.
The three cross planes are namely power
management, mobility management,
and task management. These layers of the
WSN are used to accomplish the wireless
networks and make the sensors work
together to raise the complete efficiency of
the network.
1. Application Layer
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Prof. Khaled A. Al Soufy Wireless Network, Electrical Department, 5th Level, 2nd Semester
summer 2024/2025
The application layer is liable for traffic management and offers software for
numerous applications that convert the data in a clear form to find positive
information. Sensor networks are arranged in numerous applications in different
fields such as agriculture, military, environment, medical, etc.
2. Transport layer:
There are some popular protocols in the transport layer namely STCP (Sensor
Transmission Control Protocol), PORT (Price-Oriented Reliable Transport Protocol
and PSFQ (pump slow fetch quick).
3. Network Layer
The main function of the network layer is routing, it has a lot of tasks based on the
application, but actually, the main functions are power conserving, partial memory,
and buffers.
4. Data Link Layer
The data link layer is liable for multiplexing data frame detection, data streams,
MAC, & error control, confirming the reliability of point–point (or) point–multipoint.
5. Physical Layer
IEEE 802.15.4 is suggested as typical for low-rate particular areas & wireless sensor
networks with low cost, power consumption, density, the range of communication
to improve the battery life.
8. Sensor Deployment
A single sensor may have a limited sensing range, and sensing an event or
monitoring of a particular phenomenon in a given area might require the deployment
of several sensors so that the area can be completely covered. The real issue is to
deploy enough sensors so that the area can be covered adequately. So, depending on
whether the area is easily accessible or not, sensors can be deployed randomly or
can be placed manually at regular intervals.
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Prof. Khaled A. Al Soufy Wireless Network, Electrical Department, 5th Level, 2nd Semester
summer 2024/2025
8.1. Randomly Deployed Sensor
Networks:
This process is illustrated in the next
figure, where N sensors are randomly
deployed by ejecting them from a low-
flying airplane in area A. The information
from these sensors must be collected at a
central location known as a base station
(BS) or sink node and can be located far
away from the sensors.
8.2. Regularly Deployed Sensor Networks
For many civilian applications, the areas where sensors are to be deployed are
accessible, and the sensors can be physically placed at any desirable location. For
such applications, there is no need to deploy sensors randomly given that better
coverage and enhanced efficiency can be achieved using regular placement. In such
an environment, it is better to put sensors following a regular pattern, and many such
topologies are possible. Three modes are considered, even though these three
themselves could be combined to form a composite cell.
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Prof. Khaled A. Al Soufy Wireless Network, Electrical Department, 5th Level, 2nd Semester
summer 2024/2025
9. A modern Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) faces several challenges,
including:
1. Limited power and energy: WSNs are typically composed of battery-
powered sensors that have limited energy resources. This makes it challenging
to ensure that the network can function for long periods without the need for
frequent battery replacements.
2. Limited processing and storage capabilities: Sensor nodes in a WSN are
typically small and have limited processing and storage capabilities. This
makes it difficult to perform complex tasks or store large amounts of data.
3. Heterogeneity: WSNs often consist of a variety of different sensor types and
nodes with different capabilities. This makes it challenging to ensure that the
network can function effectively and efficiently.
4. Security: WSNs are vulnerable to various types of attacks, such as
eavesdropping, jamming, and spoofing. Ensuring the security of the network
and the data it collects is a major challenge.
5. Scalability: WSNs often need to be able to support a large number of sensor
nodes and handle large amounts of data. Ensuring that the network can scale
to meet these demands is a significant challenge.
6. Interference: WSNs are often deployed in environments where there is a lot
of interference from other wireless devices. This can make it difficult to ensure
reliable communication between sensor nodes.
7. Reliability: WSNs are often used in critical applications, such as monitoring
the environment or controlling industrial processes. Ensuring that the network
is reliable and able to function correctly in all conditions is a major challenge.
8. Localization and Mobility: Node Localization: Determining the exact
position of sensor nodes accurately without GPS or with limited infrastructure.
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Prof. Khaled A. Al Soufy Wireless Network, Electrical Department, 5th Level, 2nd Semester
summer 2024/2025
[Link] in Sensor Wireless networks
The major issues that affect the design, deployment, and performance of an ad hoc
wireless system are as follows:
• Medium access scheme
• Routing
• Multicasting
• Transport layer protocol
• Pricing scheme
• Quality of service provisioning
• Self-organization
• Security
• Energy management.
• Scalability
• Deployment considerations
[Link] to be discussed in the next lecture.
Smart Agriculture: Scenario Description: A smart agriculture system utilizing WSN
within the IoT framework to optimize crop growth and resource utilization.
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