Service guarantees in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks possess unique characteristics because of their hostile deployment environment and their resource starved nature. Wireless Sensor Networks are now being deployed in a number of complex environments like battle fields, agriculture, hospitals and many more. Almost all the environments where wireless sensor networks are deployed need to sense events in their surroundings and report them to the collection points in an efficient and timely manner. Both of these requirements require a Quality of Service (QoS) based view of the entire network. In this paper we have explained why sensor networks need QoS and what are the QoS concerns in wireless sensor networks. We have also studied a number of architectures that contribute to the QoS requirements. A tradeoff regarding QoS has also been presented to explain the gains and losses of any architecture that tries to address the quality of service in wireless sensor networks.