Wireless Sensor Networks' Challenges and Future Prospects

"Application should shape and form the technology" this statement is consistent with fact or reality for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). WSN has become one of the technologies for the future. Advancements in communication and computing technologies make it possible to fabricate sensor nodes, which are small in size and reduced in cost and at the same time consume very less energy while operational. It is also possible to deploy them very easily. Such sensor nodes are involved in almost every field of life. These sensor nodes can cooperate with each other and can give their mutual consent to form WSN in an ad-hoc mode to achieve particular objective. WSNs are special case of wireless ad-hoc network. In this paper, overview of WSN is given before explaining wireless networks. WSNs support various monitoring and tracking applications. Details of the application domain is also given to understand the wide spectrum of applications supported by WSNs. Resource constraints pertaining to WSNs is also discussed while considering various applications. Apart from resource constraints, lower power consumption, prolonged network lifetime, accurate localization, lower delay, and lower cost are the key design requirements of WSNs. As WSN is a special case of wireless ad-hoc networks some of the challenges pertaining to ad-hoc networks are common with WSNs while due to resource constraints of WSNs some of them are not. Due to resource constraint nature of the WSNs there are few other challenges that are needed to be dealt with. These challenges are listed with its details so reader can understand how to deal with them. Finally, some open research issues are examined for further research. Applications of WSN use random deployment method as most of the time phenomenon is inaccessible and thus replacing batteries is not possible. For this reason energy is the scarce and invaluable resource for WSNs. Concern is given to this scarce resource during fabrication of sensor nodes but still energy efficiency is the prime concern for WSNs. This paper gives comprehensive review of WSN's application, challenges and its future prospects.