Designing Intelligent Sensor Networks: A Comprehensive Survey of Sensing, Edge AI, and 5G+/6G Connectivity

With the advent of advanced transmission technologies, powerful neural-network architectures, and the availability of cheap sensing solutions, new paradigms for monitoring, controlling, and optimizing any automated system are appearing. While traditionally, sensors simply provided visual or acoustic feedback to human operators of such systems, nowadays, autonomous systems more and more rely on the automatic sensing and processing of such data to react and adapt their control mechanisms. In such complex control systems, sensor networks play a vital role. In this paper, we assess the state of the art in the three main components used within sensor networks: smart sensing elements, transmission technologies, and processing technologies. Concerning the latter, more and more artificial intelligence-based methods are developed and applied turning smart sensor networks into intelligent or even cognitive sensor networks. For the development of such sensing systems, a high variety of performance metrics could be important to the designer. This paper discusses the vast design space for intelligent sensor networks and provides guidance and directions on how to construct future intelligent sensor networks efficiently.