Sensing the world: Challenges on WSNs

Wireless sensor network (WSNs) is a demanding multidisciplinary field that has been target of research in the last decade. The increasing demand for security and automated monitoring of things and places makes WSNs a promising technology although there are still many open research contributions needed to make this the standard of environmental sensing. The goal of this article is to identify the research challenges on WSNs by dividing them into functional groups, building on previous work. We followed a structured approach based on a simplified yet complete vision of a design space for WSNs. Moreover, this work aims to identify research gaps and investigation fields yet unexplored or hardly explored by researchers in order to plot paths for future research. Several challenges and research areas were identified, like Models for Sensor Networks, Benchmarking Methodologies, Distributed Processing, Interface WSNs and Network Reprogramming. Some of these challenges will become even clearer as increasingly WSNs become Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSANs).