Advances in Real-World Sensor Network System

Significant advancements in wireless communication, microelectronic technologies, and distributed systems have revealed the great potential of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) for pervasive applications. Sensor networks are being increasingly used for sensing, monitoring, and controlling in various application fields. In the past decade, sensor network technology has stimulated much research interest from the academia to the industry. The technology development is now matured to a point, where real-world and business applications are emerging, and the engineers and investors are increasingly getting involved into its development. This chapter surveys the existing state-of-the-art of real-world sensor network system designs and their application. The authors of this chapter have also described their own hands-on experience and lessons when applying the sensor network technologies in real-world application. The chapter mainly consists of survey of the practical system contributions in: (a) different layers of sensor networks (such as transport layer, network layer and link layer), (b) operating system and software development, middleware of WSN (such as network management, neighbor discovery, topology control, energy management, data storage, localization, time synchronization, and security), and (c) experience and lessons from real-world sensor network deployment and maintenance. Finally this chapter concludes with brief comments on current state of the Sensor Network technologies, its challenges and future opportunities.