The Impact of Sensor Deployment on Protocol Design in Sensor Networks

Many applications such as weather data collection, vehicle tracking, habitat monitoring, etc. need to perform long-term monitoring of a physical environment [3], [5]. Such applica-tions, in combination with the fast development in microelec-tronics, triggered the emergence of a new paradigm of network, the wireless sensor network, which is generally envisioned to consist of hundreds to thousands of simple wireless nodes. In-dividual wireless node normally includes a simple sensor and a low power microprocessor and radio, thus having some sensing capability and computational power with limited radio band-width. Unlike mobile ad hoc networks [6], energy efficiency in sensor networks is of paramount importance. As such, most protocols used in ad hoc networks for resource management are not applicable to a sensor network environment