Design and Hardware Implementing of Optical Physical Layer for Wireless Sensor Network Applications

Wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of some small and cheap nodes which could communicate together, process gathered data, and sense the environment. Today’s developments in wireless communication systems, causes higher data rate for multimedia applications. The optical wireless communication (OWC) can provide higher data rates and more secured communication links rather that radio frequency (RF) technology for some applications such as underwater communications. In this paper, the optical technology is employed for data transmission in WSNs. An optical wireless sensor network (OWSN) is realized based on sensor nodes and cluster head (CH). Different hardware parts of designed sensor boards are evaluated and the optical communication parameters are measured. An optimized media access control protocol called VMAC is presented. In the proposed OWSN, both nodes and CH are modular. The experimental results show that the maximum transmission distance for 300bps and 600bps baud rates are 18m with 0% BER and 21m with 10% BER, respectively.