Environmental applications include tracking the movements and
patterns of insects, birds or small animals. Intelligent transportation systems
are often interested in wide-area tracking of vehicles where the statistics of
such information could be used to better design the highway transport infrastructure.
WSNs for tracking combine some of the characteristics of the above
three classes. For instance, when the target is detected, the sink needs to be
notified promptly. Then, the sink may initiate queries to receive time-stamped
location estimates of the target, so that it can calculate the trajectory and
keep querying the appropriate sets of sensors. To design communication protocols
we have to answer questions like: is it better to query, compute and route
on the fly; or is it better to maintain some level of organization or connectivity
to streamline the process of tracking; and so on.
3 Salient Features of Sensor Networks
In the previous section we discussed the applications of sensor networks, and
a taxonomy of sensor networks based on the characteristic features of these
applications. We noted that sensor networks are very diverse due to their
broad range of applications. In this section, we study some of the salient
features of sensor networks.
3.1 Collaborative Objective
Perhaps the most important aspect of sensor networks that di?®erentiates them
from other wireless networks is their objective.
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