1. Introduction

Sensing is life; WSNs are acquiring snowballing interests in research and industry; they are infiltrated in day-to-day use. Owing to their requirement of low device complexity as well as slight energy consumption, proper standards are devised to ensure impeccable communication and meaningful sensing. This chapter takes care of enlightening the special features of WSNs and differentiates WSNs from MANETs and mesh networks. Care is also accorded to the different WSN standards that adapt to home and industry applications.

The critical requirement of any WSN deployment strategy is to gather and export the collected into an enterprise application or a spreadsheet. Embedded WSN-to-Internet integration is implemented via some kind of gateway device seated between the IEEE 802.15.4 network and the IP network. The gateway server’s role is to translate the sensor network traffic and provide it in a consumable form for another network, either IP or an industrial network. Also, the 6LoWPAN working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) submitted the implementation of IP for low-power, low-bandwidth networks. 6LoWPAN defines IP communication over low-power wireless IEEE 802.15.4 personal area networks. The proposed standard, approved by the IETF in March 2007, incorporates IPv6 version of the IP protocol. Because of IP pervasiveness as a global communication standard across industries, vendors can create sensor nodes that can communicate directly with other IP devices, whether those devices are wired or wireless, local or across the Internet, on Ethernet, WiFi, 6LoWPAN, or other networks. Network managers are thus able to gain direct real-time access to sensor nodes and are able to apply a broad range of Internet management and security tools. More important, the WSN can be viewed and managed as just another IP device, making it accessible and familiar to many more people and applications.

WSN standards are tailored to suit typical applications; they vary accordingly from manufacturer to another depending on their main line of activity, whether it is pointed toward industry, military, environment, health, daily life, etc. As such there is no default standard, but there is a standard that fits in a given type of application and that characterizes a given producer.

This chapter offers an in-depth exhibition of the types of WSNs, the performance metrics of WSNs, and the different WSN standards.