Quality of Service in Wireless Sensor Networks: Imperatives and Challenges

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is an effective sensing technology that is used to replicate the human capability of sensing, collecting, computing, processing and transmitting the data that is collected from a very large area. In recent past, sensor technology has shown tremendous development in the field of environment & health monitoring, military surveillance, vehicle tracking, and detection. The participating sensor nodes are prone to failure because of limited resources. The topology of the networks is highly dynamic in nature because of frequent failure of the sensor nodes. The Quality of Service support to highly dynamic networks is one of the challenging tasks. The dynamic nature, unpredictable topology, the demand of miniature size of the devices, tiny size of sensors and limited resources attract the researchers towards the designing of QoS aware protocols. This paper has discussed the architecture, applications, life cycle and types of WSN. Further, various QoS protocols, their limitations, and challenges have also been discussed. Further, this paper presents the most important open issues and challenges in providing QoSs provisioning to the WSN as QoS routing, energy consumption, bandwidth utilization, security, and mobility. This comprehensive review surely helps the researchers to find the new existing challenges and also help them to design new research problems for their future work.