  Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have the goal of gathering data from the
environment. The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) drastically changed
WSN's vision that, as never before, needs to expand and include hundreds or
thousands of sensors. But to follow the current IoT trends new techniques need
to be implemented since orders of thousands of sensor nodes are not manageable
by today's WSNs systems that often rely on manual configuration and hence are
not practical. As an example, the replacement of batteries of thousand of nodes
could be extremely arduous or even impossible for structural health monitoring
of civil infrastructures (i.e. bridges, towers). Hence, the solution to the
growing burden of the system manager is automation, allowing the system to
check its own status, to re-configure itself and fix the major problems in the
network whenever it is possible. In this paper, we present and discuss the main
features needed to achieve an autonomous large scale WSN. Furthermore, we
compare these features with the state of the art of real-world large scale WSN
deployments showing that further solutions are needed to drastically reduce
human intervention while guaranteeing the main functionalities of the system.
