Design considerations for a self-managed wireless sensor cloud for emergency response scenario

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have become widely used in various applications areas including environmental monitoring, surveillance and military applications. As the complexity of WSNs increase and the application areas in which they are used become more critical, the requirement of such networks to be self managing becomes necessary. Various aspects of a WSN like power management, event management, data aggregation, connectivity management, polling etc. have to be performed automatically by the sensor cloud. In this paper we give a brief taxonomical overview of the elements that influence the design of a WSN with reference to emergency response / critical applications. We also look at different scenarios that could occur and the various housekeeping functions each sensor node would adopt as part of the self management requirement of such a sensor cloud.