End-to-End Reliability in Wireless Sensor Networks: Survey and Research Challenges

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN)s are highly distributed self-organized systems. They rely on significant numbers of scattered low-cost tiny devices featuring strong limitations in terms of processing, memory, communications and energy capabilities. Sensor nodes collect measurements of interest over a given space, making them available to external systems and networks at special nodes designated sink nodes. In order to maximize the autonomy of individual nodes (and consequently the longevity of the network), power saving techniques are commonly implemented, causing nodes to sleep most of the time, complemented with low power communications that usually lead to multihop data transmission from sensor nodes to sink nodes and vice versa.