Signal Processing-Assisted Protocols and Algorithms for Cooperating Objects and Wireless Sensor Networks

Copyright © 2010 Carles Antón-Haro et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. With the advent of the so-called Internet of Things (IoTs), we will witness an unprecedented growth in the number of networked terminals and devices. In attaining this IoT vision, a class of energy-and, in general, resource-constrained systems like wireless sensor networks (WSNs), or networks of cooperating objects and embedded devices, are to play a pivotal role. However, the paradigm shift from general-purpose to application-oriented networks (e.g., for event detection, localization, parameter, or random field estimation) clearly calls for further optimization at the physical, link, and network layers. To that aim, some inspiration could be borrowed from other communication schemes, such as MIMO or cooperative communications, that were traditionally developed for wireless data networks. Besides, the above-mentioned estimation/detection/localization problems have been addressed for years by the signal processing community , this resulting into large number of well-known algorithms and solutions. However, the challenge now is to enhance such algorithms and make them suitable for decentralized and resource-constrained operation in large sensor networks. Complementarily, the vast literature produced by the information theory community reveals the theoretical performance limits of decentralized processing (e.g., distributed source coding), thus offering insights on the scalability properties and asymptotic behavior of such networks. Realizing the information-theoretic performance with practical decentralized networking, radio resource management schemes, routing protocols, and other network management paradigms is a key challenge, as well. The objective of this special issue, the preparation of which was carried out under the auspices of the EC-funded Network of Excellence in Wireless Communications NEWCOM++, was to gather recent advances in the areas of cooperating objects, embedded devices, and wireless sensor networks. The emphasis was on how the design of future physical, link, and network layers could benefit from signal processing-oriented approaches. We received about 30 paper submissions by the deadline in February 2010. After extensive and careful reviews followed by the discussions at the editorial team level, we accepted 11 papers that, in our opinion, bear the highest quality and the best fit with the topic of this special issue. The accepted papers belong to three main research areas: cooperative localization and tracking, decentralized estimation and detection, and low-complexity and energy-saving communication and networking protocols. The first group of papers …