Date Added: Jan 2012
The use of small, inexpensive, low-power, distributed devices, which have the potential of local processing and wireless communication, have been made a reality owing to the recent technological improvements. These kinds of nodes are known as sensor nodes. The ability of each sensor node is restricted in terms of limited amount of processing. However, the sensor nodes have the capability to gauge a given physical environment in great detail in cases where the sensor nodes are coordinated with the information from a large number of other nodes. Therefore, a collection of sensor nodes coordinating to perform some specific action is known as a sensor network.