A Survey of Applications of Artificial Neural Networks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is the network nodes with limited resources such as energy, memory and processing power used in sensing an environment. WSNs are known for gathering a large amount of data from the environment. Time, accuracy and proper interpretation of data obtain is of paramount importance. This led some scientists to propose the application of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques in WSN. One AI technique that is widely proposed by researchers is Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). This is because ANN is applicable to non-linear systems, fault tolerant and adaptive to variation in information. However, ANN is a computationally intensive technique while WSN nodes typically have limited resources and this makes their marriage a challenging one. This paper investigates the techniques used by researchers in deploying ANN in WSN. The paper is limited to applications of ANN in WSN's application layer.