A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) basically forms a set or collection of sensing devices that can be easily used to monitor the assets or environment. These devices can communicate with each other wirelessly. Each of the devices is capable of sensing, processing and talking to its neighbors or peers. There is a centralized collection point also known as a sink node or a base station. The main reason behind the concept of wireless sensor networks is to embed a numerous sensor nodes into the physical world, exploitation of dense in situ sensing and actuation, network the devices so that they co-ordinate in order to execute the identification tasks of high level. The main tasks involved in the functioning of the sensor nodes include sensing, transmitting, aggregating, re-transmitting and reception at node or sink. All these activities are governed by a set of rules or protocol. The WSN protocols aim to achieve energy efficient performance of the network formed by nodes. The types of WSN protocols include routing protocols, coverage and security protocols. Usually at the academic level of research, these protocols are implemented using software and studied. But the actual implementation of a protocol using commercially available motes is difficult because their price is very high. Thus, a simple compact and cost- effective embedded hardware is developed by us which can be easily used for runtime implementation of a WSN protocol and study it practically from the experimental observation. The design of the prototype of a mote proposed by us is simple, modular, compact, handy, easy to implement, flexible in terms of investment of time, facilitates the virtual runtime implementation with ease and yields a battery efficient performance. The use of the design proposed [FIG.2] will be hence, certainly helpful for the practical study of WSN from experimental observations by Implementation of any of the concepts related to it using the developed hardware.
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