A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists
of autonomous devices with inbuilt sensors
for monitoring various environmental and physical
conditions at various places and times. These
devices have traditionally been networked
using the IEEE 802.15.4 standard as the base
with standards like Zigbee, 6LoWPAN, WirelessHART,
etc., forming the upper layers. These standards
have served well the primary requirement of
Wireless Sensor Nodes – a long battery
life. However, they have their drawbacks -
they offer limited range and throughput, they
are less secure, they need special infrastructure
so that they can be integrated into the existing
LAN and they are affected by an already existing
WLAN since they use the same frequency band.
Wi-Fi addresses these issues effectively and
WSN’s have started using 802.11b/g as
the networking standard. But the RS9110-N-11-31,
which is the industry’s first single-stream
802.11n module designed specially for WSN’s,
offers the best solution. It has an ultra-low
power microcontroller which interfaces with
various sensors and Redpine’s WLAN subsystem.
The system-level and profile driven fine-grained
power control offers a battery life of over
3 years over the IPv6 framework. It offers
a higher range through STBC and also higher
throughputs which result in lesser “awake”
periods, thus reducing power consumption substantially.
The RS9110-N-11-31 supports TCP/UDP over IPv6/IPv4,
making it extremely easy to integrate into
an already existing WLAN. It supports configuration
over UART as well as Wi-Fi and offers digital
and analog interfaces to work with a variety
of sensors.