Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSANs): Insights and Scope of Research

Abstract

Recent years are witnessing the growth of different kinds of networks including Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSANs). WSANs are self-configured and ad-hoc natured networks without any permanent infrastructure that consists of numerous sensor nodes and few actuator nodes that can collaboratively monitor the characteristics of physical and environmental conditions like vibration, sound, temperature, pressure, motion or pollutants, and determine an appropriate action to take depending upon the sensed data, thereby changing the state of the field of interest by performing the suitable action in it. We can say it as an advancement of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) with the inclusion of actuating component. Along with the existing research challenges of WSNs, the WSANs have many additional research challenges to be addressed. This paper gives an insight into the scope of ongoing and future research in the aspect of preserving temporal relationship among the events, restoring the connectivity in case of node failures, need for QoS parameters, along with several operational details of WSANs.