Abstract

During the past decade, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely used in many applications, including environment monitoring, homeland security, industrial control, and disaster alarm. The community has been doing extensive research on different areas of this field, including embedded system design, communication protocol design, and in-network processing (INP) method. Different from traditional computer networks, WSNs are highly resource and environment constrained. Each sensor has a limited power capacity, a small memory, and a short transmission range. Due to all these constraints and other application-specific constraints, how to make sensors smartly use their resource, especially their energy, becomes a key challenge for research in WSN.