

This motivates a huge effort in research activities, standardization process, and industrial investments on this field since the last decade ( Chiara et. long network lifetime), a proper balance between communication and signal/data processing capabilities must be found. Owing to the requirement for low device complexity together with low energy consumption (i.e. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) enable new applications and require non-conventional paradigms for protocol design due to several constraints. These networks are sometimes more specifically referred as Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks as described in ( Akkaya et al., 2005). Wireless sensor devices can be equipped with actuators to “act” upon certain conditions. Global Positioning System (GPS) and local positioning algorithms can be used to obtain location and positioning information. The working mode of the sensor nodes may be either continuous or event driven. Wireless sensor devices also respond to queries sent from a “control site” to perform specific instructions or provide sensing samples. Then the onboard sensors start collecting information of interest. After the sensor nodes are deployed, they are responsible for self-organizing an appropriate network infrastructure often with multi-hop communication with them. The individual nodes in a wireless sensor network (WSN) are inherently resource constrained: they have limited processing speed, storage capacity, and communication bandwidth. A wireless sensor node is equipped with sensing and computing devices, radio transceivers and power components. The sensor nodes can communicate among themselves using radio signals. Typically a wireless sensor network contains hundreds of thousands of sensor nodes. One can retrieve required information from the network by injecting queries and gathering results from the sink. A sink or base station acts like an interface between users and the network. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) can be defined as a self-configured and infrastructure-less wireless networks to monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure, motion or pollutants and to cooperatively pass their data through the network to a main location or sink where the data can be observed and analysed.
