–Draft– (DO NOT DISTRIBUTE) Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey Revisited

With the recent advances in Micro ElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS) technology and wireless communications; the implementation of lowcost, lowpower, multifunctional sensor nodes that are small in size and communicate untethered in short distances has become feasible. The ever-increasing capabilities of these tiny sensor nodes enable the realization of wireless sensor networks (WSN) based on the collaborative effort of a large number of nodes. However, in order to realize the existing and envisioned applications and hence take the advantages of the potential gains of WSN necessitate effective communication protocols which can address the unique challenges posed by the WSN paradigm. Since the time these challenges had been been first pointed out in the literature, there has been a great deal of research effort focused on addressing them. Furthermore, the promising results of the research efforts since then have enabled the development and realization of practical sensor network deployment scenarios. In this paper, a survey of the applications, developed communication protocols, and real deployment scenarios proposed thus far for WSN is revisited. The objective of this survey revisit is to provide a contemporary look at the current state-of-the-art in WSN and discuss the still-open research issues in this field.