6. Summary and Conclusions

This chapter gives an overview of the trade-offs, discussions and achievements described throughout the whole book. While WSNs have the potential to become the third wireless revolution after wireless voice networks in the 80s and wireless data networks in the late 90s, power consumption and radio link robustness constitute a real bottleneck to the realization of this scenario. While many previous works addressed either power consumption or robustness, none have been able to fulfill at the same time both requirements. This book showed, through various prototypes, that robustness and low-power consumption can be achieved at the same time if an FHSS system is used and if the application space is partitioned in order to exploit the specific attributes of each scenario. Concluding, this book places the first milestone toward the design of a robust and ultra-low power radio for WSNs.