Opportunities and challenges in high-rate wireless sensor networking

Summary form only given. The first wave of embedded wireless sensor networks has generally been characterized by applications whose data rate requirements are quite low, usually less than tens of kilobits per second. The author believes that the next wave, characterized by applications in industrial process control, fabrication plants, structural health monitoring, fluid pipelining monitoring, and hydrology, will involve substantially higher data rates and will require new techniques for data delivery and for integrating computing and networking in sensor networks. This paper discusses these challenges at both the architectural and protocol levels, and suggests some research directions for the networking community. Many of these issues are also applicable in the context of Internet access over wireless "mesh" networks.