48 International Journal of Embedded and Real-Time Communication Systems, 4(4), 48-59, October-December 2013 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. ABSTRACT The hardware design of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is the crux of its effective deployment. Nowadays these networks are used in microscopic, secure and high-end embedded products. WSN’s potentiality in terms of effcient data sensing and distributed data processing has led to its usage in applications for measurement and tracking. WSN comprises of small number of embedded devices known as sensor nodes, gateways and base stations. Sensor nodes consist of sensors, processors and transceivers. The property of embedded sensor devices, also called motes, is to determine the strength of WSN. Thus processor selection for the motes plays a critical role in determining a WSN’s competency. In this article, the absolute and obvious hardware char- acteristics of available and proposed sensor nodes are discussed. The objective of this work was to increase the effciency and provision of sensor nodes by evaluating their processing and transceiver units. During this work, a sensor node was developed with ARM processor and XBee series 2 Unit. LPC 2148, LPC 2378 ARM processors were posed as processing unit and XBee series 2 acted as communication unit. Results of this experimental setup were recorded. Also a comparative study of the various available sensor nodes and proposed sensor nodes was done extensively. Wireless Sensor Network Using ARM Processors: A Review in Hardware Perspective Manivannan Doraipandian, School of Computing, SASTRA University, Tamilnadu, India Periasamy Neelamegam, School of Electrical and Electronics, SASTRA University, Tamilnadu, India Keywords: ARM, LPC 2148, LPC 2378, WSN, XBee2 and Motes INTRODUCTION A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), a spa- tially distributed network, consists of tiny devices called “sensor nodes” also referred to as “Motes”. A Wireless network’s success is attributed to its monumental advancement in processor power, communication and usage of low power embedded computing devices. Sensor nodes (Ann Holms et al., 2006) are used to monitor environmental conditions like temperature, pressure, humidity, sound, vibra- tion, position etc. The focal characteristics of sensor nodes are energy efficiency, low power consumption, small size, multi hop communica- tion, adaptability over a network, self-configure mode etc. In real time, sensor nodes are more constrained in terms of computational energy and storage resources. Factors such as accuracy, reliability, physical parameters and real time constraints are the important restraints for the design of sensor node and network. DOI: 10.4018/ijertcs.2013100103