Simple Solutions for the Second Decade of Wireless Sensor Networking

Michael Breza,Evangelos Spyrou,Shusen Yang,Poonam Yadav,Julie A Mccann,Pedro Martins

doi:10.14236/ewic/vocs2010.7

Abstract

At 2010, we are at the effective end of the first decade of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) research and that the aspects such as energy efficient routing have pretty much had their day as the sensing, computing and energy technologies have now moved on. There now seems to be a consensus in the field as to what the next challenges are. This paper will describe some of those challenges for the next decade and discuss some of the key impediments hindering WSN research. From this we report a small experiment whereby we try to take on board some of the critiques we put forward to see what we come up with. To this end, we indeed show how a simple solution can help to solve many of the problems we list, and in doing so, highlight some of the difficulties in keeping to our own recommendations regarding the future direction of WSN research.

Highlights

Engineering design and hardware technology advances of the 1990’s led to dramatic reductions in the size, power consumption and costs of digital circuitry, as well as improved wireless communications and Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS, i.e. sensor devices)
Its 2002 call for papers succinctly summarises the initial vision of the first decade of Wireless Sensor Network research as being composed of ”distributed systems of numerous smart sensors and actuators connecting computational capabilities to the physical world have the potential to revolutionise a wide array of application areas by providing an unprecedented density and fidelity of instrumentation”
This paper presents the argument that the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) community must think out of the box, get real and keep it simple

Summary

Introduction

Engineering design and hardware technology advances of the 1990’s led to dramatic reductions in the size, power consumption and costs of digital circuitry, as well as improved wireless communications and Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS, i.e. sensor devices). In order to minimise the power consumption the nodes duty cycle all behaviour except for the sensing; the PIR sensor remains active This means that when a node wakes up it must syncronise with the networks so that they have a global idea of time etc. What is common between these systems is that the identification of the object to be tracked is processed on the nodes that are doing the sensing This means that when an event is detected typically the size of the message that is being sent only consists of the type of alarm (usually an integer) and the identification of the node raising the alarm (again an integer). We assume this size for the messages in our evaluation

Methods

Results

Conclusion