Issues and Challenges in Wireless Sensor Networks

Recent advances in technology has made researchers quite optimistic towards the feasibility of Wireless sensor networks (WSNs). These are being deployed for various applications and have huge potential for research. However, owing to the multidisciplinary nature of this field, researchers have to face many a technical hitches. In this paper, an overview of the broad research issues and challenges involved in the design of WSNs are presented. Energy conservation emerges as one the most critical aspect in hardware and software related design issues, and puts a question mark on the overall practicability of WSNs. Besides, other related main issues include specialized hardware, software and operating system, synchronization, QoS, security, architecture and data collection related aspects with minimum communication and computation costs. This paper provides an insight into various such design issues for the better understanding of this field for the overall benefit of the research community working in this area.