A sensor network1 is an infrastructure comprised of sensing (measuring), computing,
and communication elements that gives an administrator the ability to instrument,
observe, and react to events and phenomena in a specified environment. The
administrator typically is a civil, governmental, commercial, or industrial entity.
The environment can be the physical world, a biological system, or an information
technology (IT) framework. Network(ed) sensor systems are seen by observers as
an important technology that will experience major deployment in the next few
years for a plethora of applications, not the least being national security
[1.1–1.3]. Typical applications include, but are not limited to, data collection,
monitoring, surveillance, and medical telemetry. In addition to sensing, one is
often also interested in control and activation.
There are four basic components in a sensor network: (1) an assembly of distributed
or localized sensors; (2) an interconnecting network (usually, but not always,
wireless-based); (3) a central point of information clustering; and (4) a set of computing
resources at the central point (or beyond) to handle data correlation, event
trending, status querying, and data mining. In this context, the sensing and computation
nodes are considered part of the sensor network; in fact, some of the computing