**10. Conclusion & future work**

The aim of this chapter is to discuss few important issues of WSNs, from the application, design and technology points of view. For designing a WSN, we need to consider different factors such as the flexibility, energy efficiency, fault tolerance, high sensing fidelity, lowcost and rapid deployment, above all the application requirements. We hope the wide range of application areas will make sensor networks an integral part of our lives in the future. However, realization of sensor networks needs to satisfy several constraints such as scalability, cost, hardware, topology change, environment and power consumption. Since these constraints are highly tight and specific for sensor networks, new wireless ad hoc networking protocols are required. To meet the requirements, many researchers are engaged in developing the technologies needed for different layers of the sensor networks protocol stack.

Future research on WSN will be directed towards maximizing area throughput in clustered Wireless Sensor Networks designed for temporal or spatial random process estimation, accounting for radio channel, PHY, MAC and NET protocol layers and data aggregation techniques, simulation and experimental verification of lifetime-aware routing, sensing spatial coverage and the enhancement of the desired sensing spatial coverage evaluation methods with practical sensor model.

The advances of wireless networking and sensor technology open up an interesting opportunity to manage human activities in a smart home environment. Real-life activities are often more complex than the case studies for both single and multi-user. Investigating such complex cases can be very challenging while we consider both single- and multi-user activities at the same time. Future work will focus on the fundamental problem of recognizing activities of multiple users using a wireless body sensor network.

Wireless Sensor Networks hold the promise of delivering a smart communication paradigm which enables setting up an intelligent network capable of handling applications that evolve from user requirements. We believe that in near future, WSN research will put a great impact on our daily life. For example, it will create a system for continual observation of physiological signals while the patients are at their homes. It will lower the cost involved with monitoring patients and increase the efficient exploitation of physiological data and the patients will have access to the highest quality medical care in their own homes. Thus, it will avoid the distress and disruption caused by a lengthy inpatient stay.
