Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks for Surveillance of Airport Surface Area

The surveillance of airport surface area is a crucial operation for the safety of passengers and the airport itself. Even if this method has shown its limits, today the airports keep employing visual inspection. Some technology radar based systems are available but they are still very expensive and do not cover exhaustively the needs. In this paper, we present the first part of a research work that aims to propose a surface surveillance method based on wireless sensor networks (WSN). To the best of our knowledge, this is an unexplored alternative. However, considering their low cost and their ability to ensure surveillance in other domains like agriculture, WSNs surely represent an interesting solution in airports. Our research focuses on the definition of a suitable routing protocol for WSN in the context of airport surface surveillance. We present in this article some properties about the context of airport surveillance and then a brief description and classification of the most popular routing protocols for WSN. Finally we identify a routing protocol for WSN that, as the most suitable for the considered context, could be used as reference in the next steps of our research works.