Ad Hoc Wireless Sensor Networking: Challenges and Issues

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) constitute an emerging application field of microelectronics that promises wide support of the interaction between people and their surroundings. Because of the extremely variable nature of this interaction, the topic of WSN is still in its early stages of development and is giving rise to several challenges, from the design of a smart device that allows easy and reliable access to the environmental characteristics, to the creation of a wireless network of devices that cooperate to perform complex tasks. In this field, the cooperation among nodes is the most peculiar aspect reflecting directly on the network operation. This paper gives an overview of the topic from the Ad Hoc networking concept perspective. Although the seeds of these concepts can be found in some already existing implementations (e.g., ZigBee), we believe many further refinements could be introduced to fully exploit the potential of the widely investigated Ad Hoc approach and the strength of the mutual interaction of networked elements.