A Survey on Data Processing Issues in Wireless Sensor Networks for Enterprise Information Infrastructure

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a key technology for a broad range of applications such as environmental and habitat monitoring, traffic control, health monitoring, supply-chain management, smart homes, security, and surveillance systems [16]. A WSN is collection of a large number of inexpensive devices capable of sensing certain physical phenomena, carrying out simple processing tasks, as well as communicating with each other using wireless networking technology in an adhoc manner. As the evolution of sensors follows Moore’s law, sensors become smaller, cheaper, and more powerful. This evolution enables the deployment of systems that can consist of hundreds or thousands of sensor nodes. Typically, sensor networks are deployed to gather physical information in a robust and autonomous manner. The data collection can be either continuous or selective, i.e., detect selected events of interest. Since sensor nodes are small battery-powered devices that are deployed in potentially inaccessible environments, energy efficiency is of paramount importance. Communication, in particular, is an expensive operation for sensor nodes, and is significantly more expensive than data processing. Although the energy efficiency of sensor nodes has certainly improved over recent years with new hardware developments (such as more powerful processors or larger memory), the main issues in wireless sensor networking remain as: