A Survey on Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have become one of the most attractive research areas in many scientific fields for the last years. WSN consists of several sensor nodes that collect data in inaccessible areas and send them to the base station (BS) or sink. At the same time sensor networks have some special characteristics compared to traditional networks, which make it hard to deal with such kind of networks. The architecture of protocol stack used by the base station and sensor nodes, integrates power and routing awareness (i.e., energy-aware routing), integrates data with networking protocols (i.e., data aggregation), communicates power efficiently through the wireless medium, and promotes cooperative efforts of sensor nodes (i.e., task management plane).