  Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become indispensable to the realization
of smart homes. The objective of this paper is to develop such a WSN that can
be used to construct smart home systems. The focus is on the design and
implementation of the wireless sensor node and the coordinator based on ZigBee
technology. A monitoring system is built by taking advantage of the GPRS
network. To support multi-hop communications, an improved routing algorithm
based on the Dijkstra algorithm is presented. Preliminary simulations have been
conducted to evaluate the performance of the algorithm.
