Showing papers on "Wireless sensor network published in 2014"
TL;DR: The current state-of-art of WBANs is surveyed based on the latest standards and publications, and open issues and challenges within each area are explored as a source of inspiration towards future developments inWBANs.
Abstract: Recent developments and technological advancements in wireless communication, MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS) technology and integrated circuits has enabled low-power, intelligent, miniaturized, invasive/non-invasive micro and nano-technology sensor nodes strategically placed in or around the human body to be used in various applications, such as personal health monitoring. This exciting new area of research is called Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) and leverages the emerging IEEE 802.15.6 and IEEE 802.15.4j standards, specifically standardized for medical WBANs. The aim of WBANs is to simplify and improve speed, accuracy, and reliability of communication of sensors/actuators within, on, and in the immediate proximity of a human body. The vast scope of challenges associated with WBANs has led to numerous publications. In this paper, we survey the current state-of-art of WBANs based on the latest standards and publications. Open issues and challenges within each area are also explored as a source of inspiration towards future developments in WBANs.
1,359 citations
TL;DR: This survey gives an overview of wireless sensor networks and their application domains including the challenges that should be addressed in order to push the technology further and identifies several open research issues that need to be investigated in future.
Abstract: Wireless sensor network (WSN) has emerged as one of the most promising technologies for the future. This has been enabled by advances in technology and availability of small, inexpensive, and smart sensors resulting in cost effective and easily deployable WSNs. However, researchers must address a variety of challenges to facilitate the widespread deployment of WSN technology in real-world domains. In this survey, we give an overview of wireless sensor networks and their application domains including the challenges that should be addressed in order to push the technology further. Then we review the recent technologies and testbeds for WSNs. Finally, we identify several open research issues that need to be investigated in future.
Our survey is different from existing surveys in that we focus on recent developments in wireless sensor network technologies. We review the leading research projects, standards and technologies, and platforms. Moreover, we highlight a recent phenomenon in WSN research that is to explore synergy between sensor networks and other technologies and explain how this can help sensor networks achieve their full potential. This paper intends to help new researchers entering the domain of WSNs by providing a comprehensive survey on recent developments.
922 citations
TL;DR: A top-down survey of the trade-offs between application requirements and lifetime extension that arise when designing wireless sensor networks is presented and a new classification of energy-conservation schemes found in the recent literature is presented.
785 citations
TL;DR: A survey of the state-of-the-art in Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) that are proposed for WSNs is presented, followed by the analysis and comparison of each scheme along with their advantages and disadvantages.
Abstract: Wireless Sensor Networking is one of the most promising technologies that have applications ranging from health care to tactical military. Although Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have appealing features (e.g., low installation cost, unattended network operation), due to the lack of a physical line of defense (i.e., there are no gateways or switches to monitor the information flow), the security of such networks is a big concern, especially for the applications where confidentiality has prime importance. Therefore, in order to operate WSNs in a secure way, any kind of intrusions should be detected before attackers can harm the network (i.e., sensor nodes) and/or information destination (i.e., data sink or base station). In this article, a survey of the state-of-the-art in Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) that are proposed for WSNs is presented. Firstly, detailed information about IDSs is provided. Secondly, a brief survey of IDSs proposed for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) is presented and applicability of those systems to WSNs are discussed. Thirdly, IDSs proposed for WSNs are presented. This is followed by the analysis and comparison of each scheme along with their advantages and disadvantages. Finally, guidelines on IDSs that are potentially applicable to WSNs are provided. Our survey is concluded by highlighting open research issues in the field.
743 citations
TL;DR: An extensive literature review over the period 2002-2013 of machine learning methods that were used to address common issues in WSNs is presented and a comparative guide is provided to aid WSN designers in developing suitable machine learning solutions for their specific application challenges.
Abstract: Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) monitor dynamic environments that change rapidly over time. This dynamic behavior is either caused by external factors or initiated by the system designers themselves. To adapt to such conditions, sensor networks often adopt machine learning techniques to eliminate the need for unnecessary redesign. Machine learning also inspires many practical solutions that maximize resource utilization and prolong the lifespan of the network. In this paper, we present an extensive literature review over the period 2002–2013 of machine learning methods that were used to address common issues in WSNs. The advantages and disadvantages of each proposed algorithm are evaluated against the corresponding problem. We also provide a comparative guide to aid WSN designers in developing suitable machine learning solutions for their specific application challenges.
704 citations
TL;DR: An overview of WBAN main applications, technologies and standards, issues in WBANs design, and evolutions is reported, with the aim of providing useful insights for WBAN designers and of highlighting the main issues affecting the performance of these kind of networks.
Abstract: Interest in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) has increased significantly in recent years thanks to the advances in microelectronics and wireless communications. Owing to the very stringent application requirements in terms of reliability, energy efficiency, and low device complexity, the design of these networks requires the definition of new protocols with respect to those used in general purpose wireless sensor networks. This motivates the effort in research activities and in standardisation process of the last years. This survey paper aims at reporting an overview of WBAN main applications, technologies and standards, issues in WBANs design, and evolutions. Some case studies are reported, based on both real implementation and experimentation on the field, and on simulations. These results have the aim of providing useful insights for WBAN designers and of highlighting the main issues affecting the performance of these kind of networks.
597 citations
TL;DR: An automated irrigation system developed to optimize water use for agricultural crops has the potential to be useful in water limited geographically isolated areas.
Abstract: An automated irrigation system was developed to optimize water use for agricultural crops. The system has a distributed wireless network of soil-moisture and temperature sensors placed in the root zone of the plants. In addition, a gateway unit handles sensor information, triggers actuators, and transmits data to a web application. An algorithm was developed with threshold values of temperature and soil moisture that was programmed into a microcontroller-based gateway to control water quantity. The system was powered by photovoltaic panels and had a duplex communication link based on a cellular-Internet interface that allowed for data inspection and irrigation scheduling to be programmed through a web page. The automated system was tested in a sage crop field for 136 days and water savings of up to 90% compared with traditional irrigation practices of the agricultural zone were achieved. Three replicas of the automated system have been used successfully in other places for 18 months. Because of its energy autonomy and low cost, the system has the potential to be useful in water limited geographically isolated areas.
591 citations
TL;DR: An overview of the different routing strategies used in wireless sensor networks is given and the comparison of these different routing protocols based on metrics such as mobility support, stability, issues and latency is shown.
Abstract: This paper represents energy efficient routing protocols in WSN. It is a collection of sensor nodes with a set of limited Processor and limited memory unit embedded in it. Reliable routing of packets from the sensor node to its base station is the most important task for the networks. The routing protocols applied for the other networks cannot be used here due to its battery powered nodes This paper gives an overview of the different routing strategies used in wireless sensor networks and gives a brief working model of energy efficient routing protocols in WSN. It also shows the comparison of these different routing protocols based on metrics such as mobility support, stability, issues and latency.
579 citations
TL;DR: The focus of this paper is on the relay's strategies to distribute the harvested energy among the multiple users and their impact on the system performance, and asymptotic results show that its outage performance decays as log SNR/SNR.
Abstract: In this paper, a wireless cooperative network is considered, in which multiple source-destination pairs communicate with each other via an energy harvesting relay. The focus of this paper is on the relay's strategies to distribute the harvested energy among the multiple users and their impact on the system performance. Specifically, a non-cooperative strategy that uses the energy harvested from the i-th source as the relay transmission power to the i-th destination is considered first, and asymptotic results show that its outage performance decays as log SNR/SNR. A faster decay rate, 1/SNR, can be achieved by two centralized strategies proposed next, of which a water filling based one can achieve optimal performance with respect to several criteria, at the price of high complexity. An auction based power allocation scheme is also proposed to achieve a better tradeoff between system performance and complexity. Simulation results are provided to confirm the accuracy of the developed analytical results.
577 citations
01 Sep 2014
TL;DR: A novel user authentication and key agreement scheme for heterogeneous ad hoc wireless sensor networks is proposed, which ensures mutual authentication between the user, sensor node, and the gateway node (GWN), although the GWN is never contacted by the user.
Abstract: The idea of the Internet of Things (IOT) notion is that everything within the global network is accessible and interconnected. As such Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) play a vital role in such an environment, since they cover a wide application field. Such interconnection can be seen from the aspect of a remote user who can access a single desired sensor node from the WSN without the necessity of firstly connecting with a gateway node (GWN). This paper focuses on such an environment and proposes a novel user authentication and key agreement scheme for heterogeneous ad hoc wireless sensor networks. The proposed scheme enables a remote user to securely negotiate a session key with a general sensor node, using a lightweight key agreement protocol. The proposed scheme ensures mutual authentication between the user, sensor node, and the gateway node (GWN), although the GWN is never contacted by the user. The proposed scheme has been adapted to the resource-constrained architecture of the WSN, thus it uses only simple hash and XOR computations. Our proposed scheme tackles these risks and the challenges posed by the IOT, by ensuring high security and performance features.
529 citations
14 Oct 2014
TL;DR: In this article, various ambient energy harvesting technologies (solar, thermal, wireless, and piezoelectric) are reviewed in detail and their applicability in the development of self-sustaining wireless platforms is discussed.
Abstract: In this paper, various ambient energy-harvesting technologies (solar, thermal, wireless, and piezoelectric) are reviewed in detail and their applicability in the development of self-sustaining wireless platforms is discussed. Specifically, far-field low-power-density energy-harvesting technology is thoroughly investigated and a benchmarking prototype of an embedded microcontroller-enabled sensor platform has been successfully powered by an ambient ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) digital TV signal (512-566 MHz) where a broadcasting antenna is 6.3 km away from the proposed wireless energy-harvesting device. A high-efficiency dual-band ambient energy harvester at 915 MHz and 2.45 GHz and an energy harvester for on-body application at 460 MHz are also presented to verify the capabilities of ambient UHF/RF energy harvesting as an enabling technology for Internet of Things and smart skins applications.
06 Mar 2014
TL;DR: A novel architecture model for IoT with the help of Semantic Fusion Model (SFM) is presented, which introduces the use of Smart Semantic framework to encapsulate the processed information from sensor networks.
Abstract: Internet-of-Things (IoT) is the convergence of Internet with RFID, Sensor and smart objects. IoT can be defined as “things belonging to the Internet” to supply and access all of real-world information. Billions of devices are expected to be associated into the system and that shall require huge distribution of networks as well as the process of transforming raw data into meaningful inferences. IoT is the biggest promise of the technology today, but still lacking a novel mechanism, which can be perceived through the lenses of Internet, things and semantic vision. This paper presents a novel architecture model for IoT with the help of Semantic Fusion Model (SFM). This architecture introduces the use of Smart Semantic framework to encapsulate the processed information from sensor networks. The smart embedded system is having semantic logic and semantic value based Information to make the system an intelligent system. This paper presents a discussion on Internet oriented applications, services, visual aspect and challenges for Internet of things using RFID, 6lowpan and sensor networks.
01 Jan 2014
TL;DR: This paper briefly introduces the CS theory with respect to the sampling and transmission coordination during the network lifetime through providing a compressed sampling process with low computation costs, and proposes a CS-based framework for IoT and an efficient cluster-sparse reconstruction algorithm for in-network compression.
TL;DR: Experimental results show that FAF-EBRM outperforms LEACH and EEUC, which balances the energy consumption, prolongs the function lifetime and guarantees high QoS of WSN.
Abstract: As an important part of industrial application (IA), the wireless sensor network (WSN) has been an active research area over the past few years. Due to the limited energy and communication ability of sensor nodes, it seems especially important to design a routing protocol for WSNs so that sensing data can be transmitted to the receiver effectively. An energy-balanced routing method based on forward-aware factor (FAF-EBRM) is proposed in this paper. In FAF-EBRM, the next-hop node is selected according to the awareness of link weight and forward energy density. Furthermore, a spontaneous reconstruction mechanism for local topology is designed additionally. In the experiments, FAF-EBRM is compared with LEACH and EEUC, experimental results show that FAF-EBRM outperforms LEACH and EEUC, which balances the energy consumption, prolongs the function lifetime and guarantees high QoS of WSN.
TL;DR: A state-of-the-art and comprehensive survey on clustering approaches in WSNs, which surveys the proposed approaches in the past few years in a classified manner and compares them based on different metrics such as mobility, cluster count, cluster size, and algorithm complexity.
TL;DR: This paper presents Linear/Nonlinear Programming (LP/NLP) formulations of these problems followed by two proposed algorithms for the same based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) followed by results compared with the existing algorithms to demonstrate their superiority.
TL;DR: This paper from the 9th International Conference on Future Networks and Communications, FNC 2014 conference proceedings describes a wireless sensor network system developed using open-source hardware platforms, Arduino and Raspberry Pi.
TL;DR: Simulation results show that ADCMCST could greatly reduce the topology formation time, and achieve good approximation results; when the compression ratio is less than 70 %, the network lifetime of ADC MCST will be larger than that of energy driven tree construction.
Abstract: In this paper we propose an approximation algorithm, which is called ADCMCST (algorithm with the minimum number of child nodes when the depth is restricted), to construct a tree network for homogeneous wireless sensor network, so as to reduce and balance the payload of each node, and consequently prolong the network lifetime. When the monitoring node obtains the neighbor graph, ADCMCST tries to find a tree topology with a minimum number of child nodes, and then broadcast the topology to every node, and finally a tree network is constructed. Simulation results show that ADCMCST could greatly reduce the topology formation time, and achieve good approximation results; when the compression ratio is less than 70 %, the network lifetime of ADCMCST will be larger than that of energy driven tree construction.
TL;DR: A broader view towards the WSN solution is presented by discussing important functions like medium access control, routing, and transport in detail to give some insight into specific requirements and the classification of protocols based on certain factors.
Abstract: Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are applicable in numerous domains, including industrial automation where WSNs may be used for monitoring and control of industrial plants and equipment. However, the requirements in the industrial systems differ from the general WSN requirements. In recent years, standards have been defined by several industrial alliances. These standards are specified as frameworks with modifiable parts that can be defined based on the particular application of WSN. However, limited work has been done on defining industry-specific protocols that could be used as a part of these standards. In this survey, we discuss representative protocols that meet some of the requirements of the industrial applications. Since the industrial applications domain in itself is a vast area, we divide them into classes with similar requirements. We discuss these industrial classes, set of common requirements and various state-of-the-art WSN standards proposed to satisfy these requirements. We then present a broader view towards the WSN solution by discussing important functions like medium access control, routing, and transport in detail to give some insight into specific requirements and the classification of protocols based on certain factors. We list and discuss representative protocols for each of these functions that address requirements defined in the industrial classes. Security function is discussed in brief, mainly in relation to industrial standards. Finally, we identify unsolved challenges that are encountered during design of protocols and standards. In addition some new challenges are introduced and discussed.
TL;DR: This paper focuses on network topology management techniques for tolerating/handling node failures in WSNs and two broad categories based on reactive and proactive methods have been identified for classifying the existing techniques.
TL;DR: A data storage framework not only enabling efficient storing of massive IoT data, but also integrating both structured and unstructured data is proposed, able to combine and extend multiple databases and Hadoop to store and manage diverse types of data collected by sensors and RFID readers.
Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) has provided a promising opportunity to build powerful industrial systems and applications by leveraging the growing ubiquity of Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) and wireless sensors devices. Benefiting from RFID and sensor network technology, common physical objects can be connected, and are able to be monitored and managed by a single system. Such a network brings a series of challenges for data storage and processing in a cloud platform. IoT data can be generated quite rapidly, the volume of data can be huge and the types of data can be various. In order to address these potential problems, this paper proposes a data storage framework not only enabling efficient storing of massive IoT data, but also integrating both structured and unstructured data. This data storage framework is able to combine and extend multiple databases and Hadoop to store and manage diverse types of data collected by sensors and RFID readers. In addition, some components are developed to extend the Hadoop to realize a distributed file repository, which is able to process massive unstructured files efficiently. A prototype system based on the proposed framework is also developed to illustrate the framework's effectiveness.
TL;DR: A comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art technologies in the field of marine environment monitoring using wireless sensor networks using WSNs and some related projects, systems, techniques, approaches and algorithms is provided.
Abstract: With the rapid development of society and the economy, an increasing number of human activities have gradually destroyed the marine environment. Marine environment monitoring is a vital problem and has increasingly attracted a great deal of research and development attention. During the past decade, various marine environment monitoring systems have been developed. The traditional marine environment monitoring system using an oceanographic research vessel is expensive and time-consuming and has a low resolution both in time and space. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have recently been considered as potentially promising alternatives for monitoring marine environments since they have a number of advantages such as unmanned operation, easy deployment, real-time monitoring, and relatively low cost. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art technologies in the field of marine environment monitoring using wireless sensor networks. It first describes application areas, a common architecture of WSN-based oceanographic monitoring systems, a general architecture of an oceanographic sensor node, sensing parameters and sensors, and wireless communication technologies. Then, it presents a detailed review of some related projects, systems, techniques, approaches and algorithms. It also discusses challenges and opportunities in the research, development, and deployment of wireless sensor networks for marine environment monitoring.
TL;DR: A new method is proposed to design a reconfigurable smart sensor interface for industrial WSN in IoT environment, in which complex programmable logic device (CPLD) is adopted as the core controller and the standard of IEEE1451.2 intelligent sensor interface specification is adopted.
Abstract: A sensor interface device is essential for sensor data collection of industrial wireless sensor networks (WSN) in IoT environments. However, the current connect number, sampling rate, and signal types of sensors are generally restricted by the device. Meanwhile, in the Internet of Things (IoT) environment, each sensor connected to the device is required to write complicated and cumbersome data collection program code. In this paper, to solve these problems, a new method is proposed to design a reconfigurable smart sensor interface for industrial WSN in IoT environment, in which complex programmable logic device (CPLD) is adopted as the core controller. Thus, it can read data in parallel and in real time with high speed on multiple different sensor data. The standard of IEEE1451.2 intelligent sensor interface specification is adopted for this design. It comprehensively stipulates the smart sensor hardware and software design framework and relevant interface protocol to realize the intelligent acquisition for common sensors. A new solution is provided for the traditional sensor data acquisitions. The device is combined with the newest CPLD programmable technology and the standard of IEEE1451.2 intelligent sensor specification. Performance of the proposed system is verified and good effects are achieved in practical application of IoT to water environment monitoring.
TL;DR: WRP enables a mobile sink to retrieve all sensed data within a given deadline while conserving the energy expenditure of sensor nodes and reduces energy consumption and network lifetime by 44%, as compared with existing algorithms.
Abstract: Several studies have demonstrated the benefits of using a mobile sink to reduce the energy consumption of nodes and to prevent the formation of energy holes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, these benefits are dependent on the path taken by the mobile sink, particularly in delay-sensitive applications, as all sensed data must be collected within a given time constraint. An approach proposed to address this challenge is to form a hybrid moving pattern in which a mobile-sink node only visits rendezvous points (RPs), as opposed to all nodes. Sensor nodes that are not RPs forward their sensed data via multihopping to the nearest RP. The fundamental problem then becomes computing a tour that visits all these RPs within a given delay bound. Identifying the optimal tour, however, is an NP-hard problem. To address this problem, a heuristic called weighted rendezvous planning (WRP) is proposed, whereby each sensor node is assigned a weight corresponding to its hop distance from the tour and the number of data packets that it forwards to the closest RP. WRP is validated via extensive computer simulation, and our results demonstrate that WRP enables a mobile sink to retrieve all sensed data within a given deadline while conserving the energy expenditure of sensor nodes. More specifically, WRP reduces energy consumption by 22% and increases network lifetime by 44%, as compared with existing algorithms.
TL;DR: This paper uses artificial bee colony algorithm and particle swarm optimization for sensor deployment problem followed by a heuristic for scheduling that was able to achieve the theoretical upper bound in all the experimented cases.
Abstract: Network lifetime plays an integral role in setting up an efficient wireless sensor network. The objective of this paper is twofold. The first one is to deploy sensor nodes at optimal locations such that the theoretically computed network lifetime is maximum. The second is to schedule these sensor nodes such that the network attains the maximum lifetime. Thus, the overall objective of this paper is to identify optimal deployment locations of the given sensor nodes with a pre-specified sensing range, and to schedule them such that the network lifetime is maximum with the required coverage level. Since the upper bound of the network lifetime for a given network can be computed mathematically, we use this knowledge to compute locations of deployment such that the network lifetime is maximum. Further, the nodes are scheduled to achieve this upper bound. In this paper, we use artificial bee colony algorithm and particle swarm optimization for sensor deployment problem followed by a heuristic for scheduling. A comparative study shows that artificial bee colony algorithm performs better for sensor deployment problem. The proposed heuristic was able to achieve the theoretical upper bound in all the experimented cases.
TL;DR: This paper organizes the most important proposals into a taxonomy and provides insights into their strengths and weaknesses in relation to important characteristics of applications, mote's hardware and network deployments.
Abstract: Motivated by stringent power constraints, duty cycling - the practice of turning a mote's radio on and off to conserve energy - has become a fundamental mechanism in the design of Wireless Sensor Networks. Because of its importance, a variety of approaches to duty cycling have emerged during the last decade and are being now proposed with increasingly ambitious goals, such as achieving ultra low duty cycles as low as 0.1%. Such propositions differ mostly in their reliance on nodes' synchronization, which, in turn, translates into different hardware requirements and implementation complexity. However, duty cycling may also differ in other aspects as topology dependency, network density requirements and increase in end-to-end delay. This paper organizes the most important proposals into a taxonomy and provides insights into their strengths and weaknesses in relation to important characteristics of applications, mote's hardware and network deployments.
15 Apr 2014
TL;DR: OpenSky, a sensor network based on off-the-shelf ADS-B sensors distributed to volunteers throughout Central Europe, is developed and deployed and provides real-world insights about the possibilities and limitations of such low-cost sensor networks concerning air traffic surveillance and further applications such as multilateration.
Abstract: Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) is one of the key components of the next generation air transportation system. Since ADS-B will become mandatory by 2020 for most airspaces, it is important that aspects such as capacity, applications, and security are investigated by an independent research community. However, large-scale real-world data was previously only accessible to a few closed industrial and governmental groups because it required specialized and expensive equipment. To enable researchers to conduct experimental studies based on real data, we developed OpenSky, a sensor network based on low-cost hardware connected over the Internet.OpenSky is based on off-the-shelf ADS-B sensors distributed to volunteers throughout Central Europe. It covers 720,000 sq km2, is able to capture more than 30% of the commercial air traffic in Europe, and enables researchers to analyze billions of ADS-B messages. In this paper, we report on the challenges we faced during the development and deployment of this participatory network and the insights we gained over the last two years of operations as a service to academic research groups. We go on to provide real-world insights about the possibilities and limitations of such low-cost sensor networks concerning air traffic surveillance and further applications such as multilateration.
TL;DR: Two design ideas are proposed, which provide attractive analog/RF-isolation and allow integration in compact radios and combines a dual-port polarized antenna with a self-tunable cancellation circuit.
Abstract: In-band full-duplex sets challenging requirements for wireless communication radios, in particular their capability to prevent receiver sensitivity degradation due to self-interference (transmit signals leaking into its own receiver). Previously published self-interference rejection designs require bulky components and/or antenna structures. This paper addresses this form-factor issue. First, compact radio transceiver feasibility bottlenecks are identified analytically, and tradeoff equations in function of link budget parameters are presented. These derivations indicate that the main bottlenecks can be resolved by increasing the isolation in analog/RF. Therefore, two design ideas are proposed, which provide attractive analog/RF-isolation and allow integration in compact radios. The first design proposal targets compact radio devices, such as small-cell base stations and tablet computers, and combines a dual-port polarized antenna with a self-tunable cancellation circuit. The second design proposal targets even more compact radio devices such as smartphones and sensor network nodes. This design builds on a tunable electrical balance isolator/duplexer in combination with a single-port miniature antenna. The electrical balance circuit can be implemented for scaled CMOS technology, facilitating low cost and dense integration.
TL;DR: BodyCloud is a multi-tier application-level architecture that integrates a Cloud computing platform and BSN data streams middleware that provides programming abstractions that allow the rapid development of community BSN applications.
TL;DR: This survey examines the typical architectures of home M2M networks and discusses the performance tradeoffs in existing designs, and reviews existing home networking projects to better understand the real-world applicability of these systems.
Abstract: Recent years have witnessed the emergence of machine-to-machine (M2M) networks as an efficient means for providing automated communications among distributed devices. Automated M2M communications can offset the overhead costs of conventional operations, thus promoting their wider adoption in fixed and mobile platforms equipped with embedded processors and sensors/actuators. In this paper, we survey M2M technologies for applications such as healthcare, energy management and entertainment. In particular, we examine the typical architectures of home M2M networks and discuss the performance tradeoffs in existing designs. Our investigation covers quality of service, energy efficiency and security issues. Moreover, we review existing home networking projects to better understand the real-world applicability of these systems. This survey contributes to better understanding of the challenges in existing M2M networks and further shed new light on future research directions.