Advances in integrated circuit design are continually shrinking the size, weight
and cost of sensor devices, while simultaneously improving their resolution
and accuracy. At the same time, modern wireless networking technologies
enable the coordination and networking of a large number of such devices. A
wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of a large number of wireless-capable
sensor devices working collaboratively to achieve a common objective. AWSN
has one or more sinks (or base-stations) which collect data from all sensor
devices. These sinks are the interface through which the WSN interacts with
the outside world.
The basic premise of a WSN is to perform networked sensing using a large
number of relatively unsophisticated sensors, instead of the conventional approach
of deploying a few expensive and sophisticated sensing modules. The
potential advantage of networked sensing over the conventional approach, can
be summarized as greater coverage, accuracy and reliability at a possibly lower
cost. Some of the early works on WSNs [6, 13, 14] motivate and discuss these
benefits in detail. The range of potential applications that WSNs are envisaged
to support, is tremendous, encompassing military, civilian, environmen-
The names of the authors appear in alphabetical order.
1 Introduction
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Aravind Iyer et al.
tal and commercial areas [2]. Some examples include networked sensors for
military surveillance, smart sensors to monitor and control manufacturing facilities,
biosensors for health applications, sensor networks to monitor habitat
or weather, and smart sensor environments for home electronics.
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