ABSTRACT
The start of the “Wireless Sensor Network” research field can be associated with the Smart Dust project []. Due to technological advances (and lots of imagination), building small-sized, energyefficient reliable devices, capable of communicating with each other and organizing themselves in ad hoc networks became possible. These devices brought a new perspective to the world of computers as we know it: they could be embedded into the environment in such a way that the user is unaware of them. The need for reconfiguration and maintenance disappeared as the network organized itself to inform the users of the most relevant events detected or to assist them in their activity. The first approach taken by the research community was to adapt the mature networking and
data dissemination algorithms coming from the already existing networks to the problem at hand. It became pretty soon obvious that this approach had limited chances of success in front of the severe limiting factors the new technology imposed (lack of energy, lack of bandwidth, lack of communication power, dynamics of environment, unreliability, etc.). A new field of research was thus born from the need of solving (some already known) problems under a new and very restrictive set of assumptions. This chapter will give a brief overview of the wireless sensor network area, by introducing the
building concepts to the reader. Then, a number of applications as well as possible typical scenarios will be presented to better understand the field of application of this new emerging technology. Up to this moment, several main areas of applications have been identified. New areas of applications are still to be discovered as the research and products grow more mature. Wireless sensor networks bring lots of challenges and often contradictory demands from the
design point of view. The last part of the chapter will be dedicated to highlighting the main directions of research involved in this field. It will serve as a brief introduction to the problems to be described in the following chapters of the book.
