Introduction - If you have any usage issues, please Google them yourself
This paper is concerned with the application of
wireless sensor network (WSN) technology to long-duration
and large-scale environmental monitoring. The holy grail is a
system that can be deployed and operated by domain spe-
cialists not engineers, but this remains some distance into the
future. We present our views as to why this field has progressed
less quickly than many envisaged it would over a decade ago.
We use real examples taken from our own work in this field to
illustrate the technological difficulties and challenges that are
entailed in meeting end-user requirements for information
gathering systems. Reliability and productivity are key con-
cerns and influence the design choices for system hardware
and software. We conclude with a discussion of long-term
challenges for WSN technology in environmental monitoring
and outline our vision of the future