Next-Generation Wireless Sensor Networks: From Fundamentals to Smart Applications

Abstract

WSNs have become a key component of the modern monitoring and automation infrastructure, allowing the realtime data gathering, intelligent decision-making, and the integration with Internet of Things (IoT) platforms. WSNs are a scalable, adaptable and autonomous solutions to a wide variety of fields, such as environmental monitoring, healthcare, industrial automation, smart cities, agriculture and defense, and are made up of spatially dispersed sensor nodes with sensing, processing and communication capabilities. This survey is a review of the foundations, network architectures, protocol stack, and technologies in the background of WSNs such as energy harvesting, localization, data aggregation, time synchronization, and fault-tolerance. The paper also addresses the key issues of security and privacy, performance evaluation metrics, and consideration of the application-oriented design. It also addresses the existing challenges, such as energy limitations, scalability, reliability of communication, and dynamic network topology and outlines the gaps in open research. The future research directions, including AI-based WSNs, 5G/6G network integration, blockchain-based security, digital twins, and energy-efficient sensors, are also discussed.