Emerging networked sensing and actuation technologies: End-to-end wireless systems design for mission critical applications

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) offer immense potential for performing detailed multi-parameter measurements in a variety of applications. When coupled with actuation, this technology could become even more powerful. WSNs have been a buoyant area of study for over a decade. Two research strands have been mainly followed: theoretical and large scale application feasibility studies on the one hand, and small scale, practical deployments on the other, with a large gap lying between these two strands. (For example, theoretical studies of wireless sensor networks have tended to involve highly sophisticated approaches to gathering data from distributed nodes, while practical implementations in industry have tended towards much simpler, point-to-point approaches that minimize complexity.) Given that such theoretical approaches to WSN design treat, by and large, all target applications as aspects of the same problem, subsequent proposed designs are complex and sophisticated. When they form the basis for practical deployments, these designs have to be considerably stripped down for two main reasons: -particular application requirements impose constraints unable to be met by the theoretically driven cumbersome and overweight designs; -much of the technology and techniques taken as given in theoretical designs are neither sufficiently mature nor sufficiently well characterized to be applied in viable, real world deployments.