Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) pose new research challenges related to the design
of algorithms, network protocols, and software that will enable the development of
applications based on sensor devices. Sensor networks are composed of cooperating
sensor nodes that can perceive the environment to monitor physical phenomena
and events of interest. WSNs are envisioned to be applied in different applications,
including, among others, habitat, environmental, and industrial monitoring, which
have great potential benefits for the society as a whole. The WSN design often employs
some approaches as energy-aware techniques, in-network processing, multihop
communication, and density control techniques to extend the network lifetime. In addition,
WSNs should be resilient to failures due to different reasons such as physical
destruction of nodes or energy depletion. Fault tolerance mechanisms should take
advantage of nodal redundancy and distributed task processing. Several challenges
still need to be overcome to have ubiquitous deployment of sensor networks. These
challenges include dynamic topology, device heterogeneity, limited power capacity,
lack of quality of service, application support, manufacturing quality, and ecological
issues.

http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/34/04717981/0471798134.pdf

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are networks of distributed autonomous devices that can sense or monitor physical or environmental conditions cooperatively. WSNs face many challenges, mainly caused by communication failures, storage and computational constraints and limited power supply. Paradigms of computational intelligence (CI) have been successfully used in recent years to address various challenges such as data aggregation and fusion, energy aware routing, task scheduling, security, optimal deployment and localization. CI provides adaptive mechanisms that exhibit intelligent behavior in complex and dynamic environments like WSNs. CI brings about flexibility, autonomous behavior, and robustness against topology changes, communication failures and scenario changes. However, WSN developers are usually not or not completely aware of the potential CI algorithms offer. On the other side, CI researchers are not familiar with all real problems and subtle requirements of WSNs. This mismatch makes collaboration and development difficult. This paper intends to close this gap and foster collaboration by offering a detailed introduction to WSNs and their properties. An extensive survey of CI applications to various problems in WSNs from various research areas and publication venues is presented in the paper. Besides, a discussion on advantages and disadvantages of CI algorithms over traditional WSN solutions is offered. In addition, a general evaluation of CI algorithms is presented, which will serve as a guide for using CI algorithms for WSNs.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5473889