Recent advances and future trends in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor networks (WSNs) have become one of the most interesting areas of research in the past few years. A WSN is composed of a number of wireless sensor nodes which form a sensor field and a sink. These large numbers of nodes, having the abilities to sense their surroundings, perform limited computation and communicate wirelessly form the WSNs. Recent advances in wireless and electronic technologies have enabled a wide range of applications of WSNs in military, traffic surveillance, target tracking, environment monitoring, healthcare monitoring, and so on. There are many new challenges that have surfaced for the designers of WSNs, in order to meet the requirements of various applications like sensed quantities, size of nodes, and nodes’ autonomy. Therefore, improvements in the current technologies and better solutions to these challenges are required. The future developments in sensor nodes must produce very powerful and costeffective devices, so that they may be used in applications like underwater acoustic sensor systems, sensing based cyberphysical systems, timecritical applications, cognitive sensing and spectrum management, and security and privacy management. This paper also describes the research challenges for WSNs.