Simple Solutions for the Second Decade of Wireless Sensor Networking

At 2010, we are at the effective end of the first decade of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) research and that the aspects such as energy efficient routing have pretty much had their day as the sensing, computing and energy technologies have now moved on. There now seems to be a consensus in the field as to what the next challenges are. This paper will describe some of those challenges for the next decade and discuss some of the key impediments hindering WSN research. From this we report a small experiment whereby we try to take on board some of the critiques we put forward to see what we come up with. To this end, we indeed show how a simple solution can help to solve many of the problems we list, and in doing so, highlight some of the difficulties in keeping to our own recommendations regarding the future direction of WSN research.