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What is WSN?A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of spatially distributed autonomous sensors tomonitor physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure,motionor 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 networkaredevices that are meant to be used by human beings (e.g., laptopcomputers,PDAs,mobile radio terminals, etc.); conversely, sensor networks do not focuson humaninteraction but instead focus on interaction with the environment

The number of nodes in sensor networks, as well as the density of deployment , can beorders of magnitude higher than in ad hoc networks as the nodes in a sensor networkareusually embedded in the environment to sense some phenomenon and possiblyactuateupon it.Terms such as unicast and multicast common in MANETs, are hardly applicable inWSNwhere we find other forms of routing such as one-to-many, many-to-one, many-to-many,etc.

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

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Deployment area. But in WSNs the no. of nodes depends upon the extension of theobserved area, characteristics of nodes and on required redundancy

The traffic in MANETs are generally going to be higher owing to the use of wellknownservices 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 aPDA) where as in case of WSNs nodes are of simple and cheap elements implementingefficient algorithms.

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

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

The QoS services in a MANET is traditionally dictated by traditional applications (low jitterfor voice applications) but for WSNs entirely new QoS is requires which also takesenergy explicitly into account.

Redundant deployment makes data centric protocol very important in case of WSNs whichis irrelevant and alien in case of MANETs.

MANETs uses public key cryptography for security purposes but WSNs use Symmetrickey cryptography.

Most nodes on WSNs applications have stationary nodes compares to MANETs.

WSNs are smaller, more powerful and more memory constrained compared to MANETs.

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Routing in MANETs support any node pairs, some source routing and distancevector protocols incur heavy control traffic but WSNs support specialized traffic patternas 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 nodesrequires mobility compared to MANETs.

The main purpose of MANET is distributed computing but W SNs are used for informationgathering.

Similarities between MANET and WSN

Both are Distributed Wireless networks that is there is not a significantnetwork infrastructure in place.

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

Both Ad hoc and sensor nodes are usually battery-poweredand therefore there is abigconcern on minimizing power consumption.

Both networks use a wireless channel placed in an unlicensed spectrumthat is pronetointerference by other radio technologies operating in the same frequency.

Self-managementis necessary because of the distributed nature of both networks