Specialty Grand Challenge: Sensor Networks

Abstract

Nowadays, Sensors have been deployed all over the daily living environment, integrated into smart phones, smart watches, and other wireless terminal devices, and become the necessities in modern daily life. With the progress of IoT (Internet of Things) and AI (artificial intelligence), more wireless sensing devices will be used to extend human senses for providing accurate and comprehensive sensory data of life activities via networking. The International Data Corporation (IDC) reports that both the number of online devices and total generated data will reach unprecedented magnitudes in 2025. Their exponential increase heralds the advent of a new era named “Internet of Everything (IoE)”. Obviously, mass data is an opportunity to develop data-driven technologies, but also a challenge for computational loading capacity. Given the transmission cost, information security, and system scalability, Sensor Network based schemes may be the current optimal solution (Akyildiz et al., 2002). The field of Sensor Networks has gone through three major reforms ranging from version 1.0 (isolated static systems) to 3.0 (invisible adaptive, self-managing systems), each of which has witnessed the revolution of IoT technology. In stage 1.0, i.e., Sensor Networks 1.0, the topics under continuous discussion are about sensor localization, intelligent management, interconnection, etc., on which most of current research products still concentrate. In other words, how to connect our physical world to the Internet through sensor networks is an everlasting hotspot. In moving forward, the fusion of sensors and networks must confront the following challenges: