Practical experience for designing a power-efficient wireless sensor network

Designing a wireless sensor network constitutes, without doubt, an excellent proposal for an educational research project: wireless sensor networks are an ever-increasing technology due to its wide range of applications, while represent a good example of multidisciplinary work that closely match the industry field. This paper introduces our experience in the implementation of a Master Thesis project consisting on the development of a wireless sensor network system using the commercial Atmel AVR Z-Link ATAVRRZ200 Kit with LR-WPAN IEEE 802.15.4 Communication Standard. The target is habitat monitoring, so the student essentially has to select the adequate set of sensors and program the nodes microcontroller to meet the application goals, as well as implement a graphical user interface showing periodically real-time sensor readings.