An analytic Study of the Key Factors Influencing the Design and Routing Techniques of a Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

A wireless sensor network contains various nodes having certain sensing, processing & communication capabilities. Actually they are multifunctional battery operated nodes called motes. These motes are small in size & battery constrained. They are operated by a power source. A wireless sensor network consists of a huge number of tiny sensor nodes which are deployed either randomly or according to some predefined distribution. The sensors nodes in a sensor network are cooperative among themselves having self-organizing ability. This ensures that a wireless network serves a wide variety of applications. Few of them are weather monitoring, health, security & military etc. As their applications are wide, this requires that sensors in a sensor network must play their role very efficiently. But, as discussed above, the sensor nodes have energy limitation. This limitation leads failure of nodes after certain round of communication. So, a sensor network suffers with sensors having energy limitations. Beside this, sensor nodes in a sensor network must fulfill connectivity & coverage requirements. In this paper, we have discussed various issues affecting the design of a wireless sensor network. This provides the readers various research issues in designing a wireless sensor network.