1 Various Approaches for Enhancing The Performance of Wireless Sensor Networks

In the current time and next decades, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) represents a new category of ad hoc networks consisting of small nodes with three functions: sensing, computation, and wireless communications capabilities. Many routing, power management, and data dissemination protocols have been designed for WSNs where energy awareness is an essential design issue to improve the overall performance of WSN. There are many approaches and techniques explored for the optimization of energy usage in wireless sensor networks. Routing represents one of these areas in which attempts for efficient utilization of energy have been made. In this paper, we report on the current state of the research on optimizing the performance of WSN using various advanced approaches. There are various directions to enhance and optimize the performance as: avoiding congestion and keep it within certain controlled value, selecting the optimum routing approach, reducing the level of power consumption to increase the life time of the sensor node and others. So, the major objective of this paper is to investigate the various techniques used in improving and enhancing the performance of WSN to let it be more reliable in various applications like: health care and biomedical treatment, environment monitoring, military survival lance, target tracking, greenhouse monitoring,…etc