Design Constraints for a Wireless Network Architecture

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) represent an emerging important branch of the wireless communication field. Environmental and structural monitoring is one of its main applications. In this paper, the authors review the recent development of some WSN designs and applications addressed toward the area of structural monitoring, as well as the design constraint of a WSN prototyped in authors’ lab. As a promising solution to the power supply bottleneck of WSN, energy harvesting and storage will also be discussed.