A Hybrid Radio Over Fiber Wireless Sensor Network Architecture

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are often applied to monitor the environment such as mine. Due to the rapid attenuation of the wireless signals and the limited power of the WSN nodes, the performances of WSN in these environments are not ideal. In this paper, we present a hybrid radio over fiber wireless sensor network architecture to compensate the weakness of traditional WSN architecture. Considering the remote antenna unit of radio over fiber as a heterogeneous cluster sink node of the WSN, this paper investigates the impact of different rules and behaviors of remote antenna unit on the hybrid architecture. Analyses and simulation results show that a suitable number of remote antenna units can significantly reduce the network delay, energy consumption and improve the practicability of the WSN.