There are several important consequences of the design space as discussed above. Clearly, a single hardware plat- form will most likely not be sufficient to support the wide range of possible applications. In order to avoid the devel- opment of application-specific hardware, it would be desir- able, however, to have available a (small) set of platforms with different capabilities that cover the design space. A modular approach, where the individual components of a sensor node can be easily exchanged, might help to par- tially overcome this difficulty. Principles and tools for se- lecting suitable hardware components for particular appli- cations would also be desirable.