ABSTRACT
Recent advances in electronics and wireless communications have enabled the development of low cost, low power, and multifunctional sensor nodes that are small in size and communicate with others in short range. These tiny sensor nodes consisting of sensing, data processing, and communicating components can be used to form wireless sensor networks further. The sensor networks can be used for various application areas, e.g., health care, monitoring environment, military usage, and home security. The application of wireless sensor networks needs to satisfy the constraints introduced by factors such as fault tolerance, scalability, cost, hardware, topology change, environment, and power consumption. Since the above
constraints are highly stringent and specific, new wireless ad hoc networking techniques are required, e.g., the hardware and software architectures, communication protocols, and application programs.
