Wireless Sensor Networks and the Internet of Things: Selected Challenges

TLDR

Wireless sensor networks are increasingly used in health‑care, industrial monitoring, and other domains, and are expected to be integrated into the Internet of Things, raising new integration issues. The study evaluates various approaches to integrate WSNs into the Internet and identifies challenges for future work. The authors analyze integration methods and outline a set of challenges to be addressed.

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are increasingly gaining impact in our day to day lives. They are finding a wide range of applications in various domains, including health-care, assisted and enhanced-living scenarios, industrial and production monitoring, control networks, and many other fields. In future, WSNs are expected to be integrated into the “Internet of Things”, where sensor nodes join the Internet dynamically, and use it to collaborate and accomplish their tasks. However, when WSNs become a part of the Internet, we must carefully investigate and analyze the issues involved with this integration. In this paper, we evaluate different approaches to integrate WSNs into the Internet and outline a set of challenges, which we target to address in the near future.