Abstract
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are currently considered as one of the key technology enablers for the monitoring systems. Since WSNs are facing large amount of emerging network applications, techniques, protocols, and attacks, it is very recommended to minimize the intervention of human in the defense process which could be inefficient and error-prone. To build such realtime system using the WSN technologies while minimizing the human's intervention, it is required to provide autonomy, scalability, self-protection, and self-healing features in an WSN application. This chapter will give an overview of the autonomic computing paradigm which is the key concept of self-protection and self-healing. It then describes the need of these features for the WSN application. It also gives an overview of the self-protection and self-healing of WSNs.