The emergence of multimedia wireless sensor networks and its characteristics bring in new problems of wireless sensor networks compared with the traditional networks and wireless networks. We mainly consider three issues in this paper, energy conservation, coverage and efficient routing, all of which are fundamental in designing and implementation of wireless sensor networks. Energy conservation is the most significant problem in wireless sensor networks due to its limited energy source intuitively. The other two issues are usually combined with the energy conservation problem. The goal of coverage requirement is to have each location in the targeted physical space within sensing range of at least one sensor node. Besides, efficient routing aims to solve the problem that the collected data are efficiently reported to end-users. We introduce several state-of-the-art works and conclude these researches concerning their various metrics. Finally, we propose some rules while designing the wireless sensor networks according to the previous works, concerning these metrics.
['Wang Bin', 'Li Wenxin', 'Li Liu']
A survey of energy conservation, routing and coverage in wireless sensor networks