Customer Reviews

Protocols and Architectures for Wireless Sensor Networks

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This is a significant reference book. It provides a very thorough walk through of all wireless sensor communications issues and protocols. If you ignore all the appendices, bibliography, etc. it clocks in a ~430 pages. It uses a fairly tiny ~10-point font, making it a bit tough to read, which is a very minor quibble. I only point that out because if they had used a more readable 11-12 point font, this book would be well over 600+ pages, which just emphasizes how much material the book covers. They generally walk through high level concepts, then drill into issues and tradeoff considerations, followed by a further drilldown into specific protocols and examples. A very solid structured approach. There is a good bit of math in the book making it highly suitable for a textbook; indeed a graduate course is stated as a target audience. There is enough meat here that you could just skip that and still learn a lot. The writing is a bit on the dry/academic side, but coherent. A lot of tables with sample data points showing cross sections of different products and how they perform; very useful in showing trends and/or the wide range of solutions and tradeoff decisions designers make in their prducts. One thing to be aware of is that sensor OSs and internal sensor hardware is generally out of scope; the focus is on communications and associated considerations and protocols. That said, a good overview of WSN node hardware and operating system considerations is provided to help put communications issues in context. Bottom line: Excellent, comprehensive reference.

I was looking for a book that covers all important aspects of wireless sensor networks. This book has a clear style and is really very comprehensive. Absolutely worth the money. I bought a used one, which was like new. After so many books in this field it is really hard to create something up to date and unique. The reference section is very rich and the curious reader can quickly find vast literature sources with excellent content. The reader needs some previous knowledge, but is absolutely not necessary to be an expert in the field. Some basic math and networking experience will help definitely, but even without that it is possible to selectively read large portions of the book. The presented theory is very accessible for EE engineers to the point where a computer scientists would be comfortable with some of it.

This book provides a profound and up-to-date description of wireless
sensor networks (WSNs), one of the hot topics in today's network
research area. All aspects of wireless sensor networks are
described in detail. These aspects are:
* types and capabilities of sensor nodes
* network architectures for WSNs,
* types and characteristics of layer-specific communication technics and
protocols in WSNs, including physical-layer considerations up to
application-specific support of WSNs
* applications in WSNs.
The authors do not only describe solutions for a lot of selective problems in
WSNs (the bibliography has more than 900 entries), they also consider
dependencies between these solutions and influences of these solutions on the
whole WSN.
This book is recommended for all readers who are interested in specific design
challenges and solutions for WSNs.

This book comes highly recommended and I have selected it for my class in wireless sensor networks. Book provides a good balance of theory and practice.