Abstract: A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of sensor nodes capable of collecting information from the environment and communicating with each other via wireless transceivers. The collected data will be delivered to one or more sinks, generally via multi-hop communication. The sensor nodes are typically expected to operate with batteries and are often deployed to not-easily-accessible or hostile environment, sometimes in large quantities. It can be difficult or impossible to replace the batteries of the sensor nodes. On the other hand, the sink is typically rich in energy. Since the sensor energy is the most precious resource in the WSN, efficient utilization of the energy to prolong the network lifetime has been the focus of much of the research on the WSN. The communications in the WSN has the many-to-one property in that data from a large number of sensor nodes tend to be concentrated into a few sinks. Since multi-hop routing is generally needed for distant sensor nodes from the sinks to save energy, the nodes near a sink can be burdened with relaying a large amount of traffic from other nodes.

Keywords: Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), wireless transceivers, Wireless Sensor Actor Networks.