Editing Wireless sensor network (section)

===Hardware===
{{Main|sensor node}}
One major challenge in a WSN is to produce ''low cost'' and ''tiny'' sensor nodes. There are an increasing number of small companies producing WSN hardware and the commercial situation can be compared to home computing in the 1970s. Many of the nodes are still in the research and development stage, particularly their software. Also inherent to sensor network adoption is the use of very low power methods for radio communication and data acquisition.

In many applications, a WSN communicates with a [[local area network]] or [[wide area network]] through a gateway. The Gateway acts as a bridge between the WSN and the other network. This enables data to be stored and processed by devices with more resources, for example, in a remotely located [[Server (computing)|server]]. A wireless wide area network used primarily for low-power devices is known as a Low-Power Wide-Area Network ([[LPWAN]]).