With the recent advances inmicro electro-mechanical systems(MEMS) technology, wireless communications, and digital electronics, the design and development of low-cost, low-power, multifunctional sensor nodes that are small in size and communicate untethered in short distances have become feasible.

The ever-increasing capabilities of these tiny sensor nodes, which include sensing, data processing, and communicating, enable the realization of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) based on the collaborative effort of a large number of sensor nodes