Basic goals:
1. determine value of some parameter at a given location; a given sensor node may be connected to different types of sensors
2. detect occurrence of events of interest and estimate parameters of detected event or events; enemy vehicle, it's speed
3. classify a detected object; tank
4. track an object: track an enemy tank as it moves through geographic area covered by network

Requirements:
~ low energy use
~ network self-organization
~ ability to periodically reconfigure itself so that it can continue to function
~ individual nodes may become disconnected, but a high degree of connectivity must be maintained

Collaborative signal processing:
~ end goal is detection/estimation of some events of interest, not just communications
~ to improve detection/estimation performance, it is often quite useful to fuse data from multiple sensors
~ data fusion requires transmission of data and control messages, and so it may put constraints on network architecture

Querying ability:
~ a user may want to query an individual node or a group of nodes for information collected in the region
~ depending on the amount of data fusion performed, it may not be feasible to transmit a large amount of the data across the network
~ instead, various local sink nodes will collect the data from a given area and create summary messages
~ a query may be directed to the sink node nearest to the desired location

Sensor types and system architecture:
~ with coming availability of low cost, short range radios along with advances in wireless networking,
~ it is expected that wireless ad hoc sensor networks will become commonly deployed
~ in these networks, each node may be equipped with a variety of sensors: acoustic , seismic , infrared , still/motion videocamera
Other features:
~ nodes may be organized in clusters such that a locally occurring event can be detected by most of, if not all, nodes in a cluster
~ each node may have sufficient processing power to make a decision
~ a node will be able to broadcast this decision to the other nodes in the cluster
~ one node may act as cluster master and contain a longer range radio using a protocol such as IEEE 802.11 or Bluetooth
Links:
»Ad Hoc Networking Links
» Grid Ad Hoc Networking Project
»Mobile Mesh: Providing Solutions For Mobile Adhoc Networking
»Henri Koskinen: Connectivity and Reliability in Ad Hoc Networks
»Security Measurement based on Attack Trees in a Mobile Ad Hoc Network Environment
»Wireless Ad Hoc Sensor Network
»Sensor Network
»Sensor Installation in the Arthur Clarke Mars Greenhouse
»JPL's Sensor Web Project