Self-Organising Sensor Networks

Sensor Networks consist of a large number of low-cost low-power devices, each with sufficient hardware to monitor one or more variables and send and receive the readings for these variables to other devices. Wireless sensor networks are becoming a powerful tool for monitoring a range of diverse situations. While the devices themselves are mostly still in the prototype stage the theory surrounding these devices is a fast moving area of research. Ad-Hoc networks are a collection of mobile devices with wireless networking capability that may form a temporary peer to peer, multi-hop network without the aid of any established infrastructure or centralised administration. Sensor networks typically make use of ad-hoc networking, but normally lack the processing power to utilize the full richness of many proposed ad-hoc network protocols.