The major problems in designing sensor networks are the high reliability required to the whole system, to be contrasted with the potential unreliability of the single sensor, and the possibility of congestions around the sink nodes that could prevent critical information to reach the control centres at the right time.

The key idea of WINSOC is the development of a totally innovative design methodology, where the high accuracy and reliability of the whole network is achieved by introducing a suitable coupling among adjacent, low cost, sensors, that gives rise to distributed decisions, much more accurate than that of each single sensor, without the need for sending all data to a fusion centre. The whole network is hierarchical and composed of two layers: a lower layer, composed of low cost sensors, responsible for gathering information from the environment and producing locally reliable decisions thanks to proper interaction among the nodes, and an upper layer, composed of more sophisticated nodes, whose goal is to convey the information to the control centres.

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The local interaction among the low cost sensors is the key point that increases the overall reliability and provides scalability and fault tolerance. Thanks to its distributed processing capabilities, the risk of having a congestion around the control nodes is strongly reduced. Building on this idea, the consortium has put together expertise from big companies, academies, research centres, end-users and SME's, to create a strong synergism between academic world, industries and end-users. The primary goals of WINSOC are to develop an innovative general purpose sensor network architecture having the distributed processing capabilities described above and to test applications on environmental risk management, with focus on landslides detection, gas leakage detection and large scale temperature field monitoring.