Information processing and data management in wireless sensor networks

The rapid progress of wireless communication and embedded micro-sensing MEMS technologies has made wireless sensor networks possible. A wireless sensor network normally comes a large area with many inexpensive, tiny sensor nodes, each capable of collecting, processing, and storing environmental information, and communicating with neighboring nodes. In the past, sensors are connected by wired lines. Nowadays, ad hoc networking technologies can much simplify the network formation task. Installation and configuration of a wireless sensor network are thus effortless. Many applications of wireless sensor networks have been proposed, including field data collection, remote monitoring and control, smart home, factory automation, security, etc. Communications in wireless sensor networks are data-centric, with the objective of delivering collected data in a timely fashion. Also, such networks are resource-constrained, in terms of sensor nodes’ processing power, communication bandwidth, storage space and energy. This gives rise to new challenges in information processing and data management in wireless sensor networks. In-network data processing techniques, from simple reporting to more complicated collective communications, such as data aggregation, broadcast, multicast and gossip should be developed. On the other hand, data collected by sensors can intrinsically be viewed as signals. By exploiting signal processing techniques, collective communications can be done in more energy-efficient ways. Moreover, distributed data management schemes need to be devised when sensed data is collected from different sources at different rates. This special issue addresses novel information processing and data management techniques involving