A survey in adaptive hybrid wireless Sensor Network for military operations

Abstract

A Sensor Network is the primary source for acquiring information in today's military operations that require situation awareness (SA) of a battlefield. There are several types of sensor nodes, and each type of sensors has limited capability. The requirement for gathering and analyzing information about the field cannot be fulfilled by one type of sensor. Several sensors are needed to be networked and provide distributed sensing in such the way that the complete information about the field can be achieved. With current sensor and wireless technologies, a large number of heterogeneous sensor nodes can be rapidly deployed and wirelessly networked in a battlefield. These sensor nodes can perform distributed sensing tasks in collaborative and cooperative manner in order to extract features of the event in the field. Unlike any typical network, military wireless sensor network is operating under the harsh condition of a battlefield. Hence, the resources are constrained in terms of energy, bandwidth, and computing power, which limit the sensing capability of the wireless sensor network. In addition, a network is prone to attack by enemies. Such a network requires the self-adaptability that can cope with intermittent changes in a harsh environment. This paper presents a survey for adaptive hybrid wireless sensor networks in the military operations, which reviews their technologies, applications, constraints, architectures, and challenges.