Here the overhead in maintaining
routes or in coordinating the sensor nodes would be too high. Hence, it is
important to route the data promptly, but without undue overheads for route
maintenance.
The two scenarios discussed above are completely di?®erent problems from a
networking standpoint. Clearly, there is a need to develop application-specific
protocol solutions. However, the danger in pursuing an application-specific
approach is to end up developing a di?®erent protocol for each application. A
careful examination of the tradeo?®s involved is necessary to avoid being too
generic or too specific. Towards this end, it is important to be able to classify
WSNs based on the following characteristics:
1. The application level objectives,
2. The data delivery requirements, and
3. The tra?±c characteristics,
Then we can design protocols that are appropriate for each class. We feel
that in order to extract the best possible performance out of a large number
of limited sensor devices, there is a strong need to develop class-specific and
integrated protocol solutions.We do understand that such a classification may
be neither exhaustive nor precise, and may result in partial overlaps between
5 Chapter 1 Design of Large-scale Sensor Networks
Aravind Iyer et al.
the application classes. However, such a classification enables us to partition
and organize the design space, and allows for a systematic approach to design
of flexible architectures and protocols.
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