| Abstract |
Highlights: What are the main findings? Tailored WSN architectures designed for specific urban applications enhance system performance regarding data throughput, accuracy, and execution time. This work evaluates the WSN architectures for the following applications: power grid monitoring, traffic management, healthcare services, waste collection, gas leak detection, water supply tracking, and asset monitoring. The overall performance of these systems largely depends on the design of the network and the roles assigned to sensor nodes. Adaptive architectures help reduce energy usage, minimize processing load, and extend the lifespan of the sensor network. What are the implications of the main findings? These findings highlight the need for intelligent, application-specific WSN designs to efficiently support complex urban systems and ensure reliable real-time data handling in smart cities. The proposed metric-based evaluation framework offers a valuable reference for developers and policymakers to design resilient, scalable, and energy-efficient WSN solutions across diverse urban infrastructure domains. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have emerged to address unique challenges in urban environments. This survey dives into the challenges faced in urban areas and explores how WSN applications can help overcome these obstacles. The diverse applications of WSNs in urban settings discussed in this paper include gas monitoring, traffic optimization, healthcare, disaster response, and security surveillance. The innovative research is considered in an urban environment, where WSNs such as energy efficiency, throughput, and scalability are deployed. Every application scenario is distinct and examined in details within this paper. In particular, smart cities represent a major domain where WSNs are increasingly integrated to enhance urban living through intelligent infrastructure. This paper emphasizes how WSNs are pivotal in realizing smart cities by enabling real-time data collection, analysis, and communication among interconnected systems. Applications such as smart transportation systems, automated waste management, smart grids, and environmental monitoring are discussed as key components of smart city ecosystems. The synergy between WSNs and smart city technologies highlights the potential to significantly improve the quality of life, resource management, and operational efficiency in modern cities. This survey specifies existing work objectives with results and limitations. The aim is to develop a methodology for evaluating the quality of performance analysis. Various performance metrics are discussed in existing research to determine the influence of real-time applications on energy consumption, network lifetime, end-to-end delay, efficiency, routing overhead, throughput, computation cost, computational overhead, reliability, loss rate, and execution time. The observed outcomes are that the proposed method achieves a higher 16% accuracy, 36% network lifetime, 20% efficiency, and 42% throughput. Additionally, the proposed method obtains 36%, 30%, 46%, 35%, and 32% reduction in energy consumption, computation cost, execution time, error rate, and computational overhead, respectively, compared to conventional methods. © 2025 by the authors. |
