Wireless Sensor Networks for the Internet of Things: Barriers and Synergies

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are recognized key enablers for the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm since its inception. WSNs are a resilient and effective distributed data collection technology, but issues related to reliability, autonomy, cost, and acc

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Wireless Sensor Networks for the Internet of Things: Barriers and Synergies Mihai T. Lazarescu

9.1 Introduction Research and technology advances continuously extend and diversify wireless sensor network (WSN) applicability. As a consequence, WSN designers faced an increasing range of applications and requirements under rising cost and time pressures since the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm was coined more than 15 years ago [1]. “Typical” requirements for WSN hardware and software are increasingly difficult to define [2] because they continuously adapt to very diverse application requirements and operating conditions at a rate which does not seem slowed down by standardization efforts or proprietary API proposals. Moreover, although WSN solutions are used for numerous applications, the implementations generally differ under various aspects which significantly reduce the economies of scale. Consequently, both hardware and software of WSN solutions are often application-specific prototypes that carry significant non-recurrent engineering costs and risks (e.g., reliability, optimization, and development time). Additionally, for various practical reasons WSN deployments are typically developed at lower abstraction levels, which can have two significant undesirable effects. First, this can divert an important development effort from application logic implementation, as shown in Fig. 9.1, which increases development time and cost, and generally decreases reliability. Second, lower abstraction level development often requires competencies that are seldom found among application domain experts, which can lead to higher development cost and more reluctant adoption of WSN-based solutions.

M.T. Lazarescu () Dip. Elettronica e Telecomunicazioni (DET), Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, Torino, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 G. Keramidas et al. (eds.), Components and Services for IoT Platforms, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42304-3_9

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Fig. 9.1 Value flow for a WSN application and platform

IoT vision to transform and enrich the way in which we perceive and interact with the reality often assumes capillary distributed devices for which WSNs continue to play an important role as one of the key enabling technologies since IoT paradigm inception. They often need to meet stringent requirements such as long maintenance-free lifetime, low cost, small size, ease of deployment and configuration, adequate processing of collected data, privacy and safety, and, not the least, fast and reliable development cycles that evolve on par with the underlying technologies. These