TABLE OF CONTENTS Recent technological advances allow us to envision a future where large numbers of low-power, inexpensive sensor devices are densely embedded in the physical environment, operating together in a wireless network. The envisioned applications of these wireless sensor networks range widely: ecological habitat monitoring, structure health monitoring, environmental contaminant detection, industrial process control, and military target tracking, among others.
A US National Research Council report titled Embedded Everywhere notes that the use of such networks throughout society could well dwarf previous milestones in the information revolution [47]. Wireless sensor networks provide bridges between the virtual world of information technology and the real physical world. They represent a fundamental paradigm shift from traditional interhuman personal communications to autonomous inter-device communications. They promise unprecedented new abilities to observe and understand large-scale, real-world phenomena at a fine spatio-temporal resolution. As a result, wireless sensor networks also have the potential to engender new breakthrough scientific advances.
While the notion of networking distributed sensors and their use in military and industrial applications dates back at least to the 1970s, the early systems were primarily wired and small in scale. It was only in the 1990s when wireless technologies and low-power VLSI design became feasible that researchers began envisioning and investigating large-scale embedded wireless sensor networks for dense sensing applications.
Perhaps one of the earliest research efforts in this direction was the low-power wireless integrated microsensors (LWIM) project at UCLA funded by DARPA [98]. The LWIM project focused...
