Designing,
manufacturing and networking wireless sensor devices to support such a wide
variety of applications is a complex and challenging endeavor. As a result,
there has been a lot of research activity in the area of WSNs over the past
five years or so.
Research in the area of WSNs has been active at several levels, starting
from the component level, the system level, and all the way up to the application
level. The component level research focuses on improving the sensing,
communication and computation capabilities of an individual sensor device.
Research at the system level is concerned with the mechanism of networking
and coordinating several sensor devices in an energy-e?±cient and scalable
fashion. Research at the application level is concerned with the processing of
the data produced by sensors, depending on the application objectives. Examples
of such problems include localization of a target being tracked by using
measurements from several sensors, computing the spatial profile of a signal
of interest using all the sensor readings, and so on.
In this chapter, we are concerned with research at the system level, in
general, and communication and networking protocols, in particular. Our aim
is to establish a framework for designing communication protocols for WSN
applications, involving the tetherless deployment of a large number of sensor
nodes. By tetherless, we mean not attached to or assisted by any infrastructure.
Pages:
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39