**4.1. Star network (single point-to-multipoint) (Wilson, 2005)**

A star network is a communications topology where a single base station can send and/or receive a message to a number of remote nodes. The remote nodes are not permitted to send messages to each other. The advantage of this type of network for wireless sensor networks includes simplicity, ability to keep the remote node's power consumption to a minimum. It also allows low latency communications between the remote node and the base station. The disadvantage of such a network is that the base station must be within radio transmission range of all the individual nodes and is not as robust as other networks due to its dependency on a single node to manage the network.

**Figure 2.** A Star network topology
