A survey on network protocols for wireless sensor networks

Recent advances in MEMS (micro-electromechanical systems), processor, radio, and memory technologies have dramatically enabled development of wireless sensor networks. A sensor network is a large network of small sensor nodes, capable of sensing, communication, and computation. It can be deployed to sense some physical phenomenon for a wide variety of applications. During recent years, research in wireless sensor networks has become more and more active. Network protocols developed for sensor networks are of great importance to meet specific design goals of sensor networks. We present a survey of recent work addressing network protocols, including routing and information dissemination algorithms, for wireless sensor networks. We evaluate them in terms of design goals, assumptions, operation models, energy models, and performance metrics.