Design of RF transceivers for wireless sensor networks in hazardous applications

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have a great prospect in many applications, among which the monitoring of hazardous environments is becoming more and more important. The basic requirements of WSN design are low cost and low power consumption, and then a low-power system-on-chip implementation is an optimal solution for WSN nodes. However, the radio-frequency (RF) part of a node chip is usually power hungry and difficult to fully integrate, so many previous works have focused on the design of RF transceivers for WSN. Specifically, for hazardous applications, the communication range is required to be long enough to protect human from harmful environments. So a long effective communication distance is also necessary for WSN transceivers in hazardous applications. In this paper, we give a survey and a classification of WSN transceivers. Furthermore, we analyze the advantages and disadvantages of three main WSN transceivers, i.e. on-off keying transceivers, ultra-wide band transceivers, and frequency shift keying transceivers; and then find out the one most suitable for hazardous applications.