measure temperature, humidity, or vibrations. Bukova and
Svecova posited that recent developments in sensor fabrication
techniques will produce MEMS that are the size of a grain
of sand yet contain computing circuits, bidirectional wireless
communications technology and a power supply.
The number of sensors will increase in the future, and the
number and distribution of monitored objects will expand. This
will require further development of energy efficient routing
and transmission mechanisms to ensure reliable and consistent
communication. Condition monitoring will also tend to parallel
and distributed processing across multiple nodes to speed execution.
This could be processing the data in parallel at the same
geographical location using a single machine with multiple
processing cores or at the same geographical location using
multiple compute nodes or even distributed processing, where
the data are processed at multiple geographical locations, and
the results are assimilated at a central location.
As WSNs expand and become more pervasive, security
against intrusion, eavesdropping, data tampering and unauthorized
control will be ever more important [116]. WSNs pose
unique problems for security. WSNs broadcast data between
nodes making them vulnerable. The sensors are energy constrained
with limited processing capability; thus, any security
software needs to be carefully designed. Network administrators
will have to identify which WSNs need to be secured, how