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WINSOC is a STREP project co-funded by the European Commission within the RTD activities of the Thematic Priority Information Society Technologies. The project explores the possibility to develop a novel technology for Wireless Sensor Networks, which has significant potentials for overcoming conventional technologies in terms of cost, size and power consumption.

The key idea of WINSOC is the development of a totally innovative design methodology, imitating biologically systems, where the high accuracy and reliability of the whole sensor network is achieved through a proper interaction among nearby, low cost, sensors. This local interaction gives rise to distributed detection or estimation schemes, more accurate than that of each single sensor and capable to achieve globally optimal decisions, without the need to send all the collected data to a fusion centre.

The whole network is hierarchical and composed of two layers:

• a lower level, composed of the low cost sensors, responsible for gathering information from the environment and producing locally reliable decisions;
• an upper level, composed of more sophisticated nodes, whose goal is to convey the information to the control centers.

The key point is the interaction among the low cost sensors that increases the overall network reliability, it decreases the probability of congestion around the sink nodes, it provides scalability and tolerance against breakdown or stand-by of some sensors, necessary for battery recharge.