1.2 Key Ideas and Outline
Our goal is to try and provide some answers to the generic question, ???How
to design a sensor network???? from a tax-onomy-based perspective. To be
precise, we would like to consider simple but representative abstractions of
the component level capabilities, and the application level objectives, and
provide guidelines to design system level (i.e., communication and networking)
protocols. From that standpoint, we address the following key ideas by means
of this chapter:
1. We provide a taxonomy-based perspective on designing communication and
networking protocols for large-scale sensor networks.
2. For this, we first motivate and provide a taxonomy of sensor networks
based on their application level objectives, data delivery requirements,
and tra?±c characteristics.
3. Then, for each application class, we provide a discussion of the di?®erent
problems associated with designing the communication protocols.
4. We also discuss a few currently implemented sensor network testbeds, and
highlight the application-specific nature of problems.
There are several significant problems in sensor network design which can
be argued to be common to most sensor networks. However in our view,
the relative significance of the di?®erent problems changes depending on the
specific class. Therefore, it becomes important to consider the problems in
the context of a given application class. This is in contrast with some other
surveys on sensor networks (e.
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