A Taxonomy of Wireless Micro-Sensor Network Models

In future smart environments, wireless sensor networks will play a key role in sensing, collecting, and disseminating information about environmental phenomena. Sensing applications represent a new paradigm for network operation, one that has different goals from more traditional wireless networks. This paper examines this emerging field to classify wireless micro-sensor networks according to different communication functions, data delivery models, and network dynamics. This taxonomy will aid in defining appropriate communication infrastructures for different sensor network application sub spaces, allowing network designers to choose the protocol architecture that best matches the goals of their application. In addition, this taxonomy will enable new sensor network models to be defined for use in further research in this area.