Towards Developing Attentive Wireless Sensor Networks

The large, rapidly growing field of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) offers the ability to collect and process massive amounts of information from various environments. This distributed data gathering and computation with the help of tiny, power-limited devices enables their use in surveillance, target detection and various other monitoring applications. In this context, the role of a sensor network can be viewed as that of a system that pays attention to a phenomenon of interest. Thus, the current body of literature on WSNs falls into two major categories: developing networks that a. pay attention to the environment to detect the phenomenon under consideration and b. improving the quality of attention paid by WSNs to these phenomena. In this paper, we summarize a theoretical framework for the context of attention in WSNs. This paper is the first step to develop a foundation for understanding the association between the nature of attention in WSNs and their real-world applications.