Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of Wireless Sensor Network Systems

The recent advances in embedded software/hardware design have enabled large-scale and cost-effective deployment of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Such a network consists of many small sensor nodes with sensing, control, data processing, communications, and networking capabilities. The wireless sensor networks have a broad spectrum applications ranging from wild life monitoring and battlefield surveillance to border control and disaster relief and have attracted significant interests from both academy and industry. A wireless sensor node generally has limited storage and computation capabilities, as well as severely constrained power supplies, and the networks often operate in harsh unattended environments. Successful design and deployment of wireless sensor networks thus call for technology advances and integrations in diverse fields including embedded hardware manufacturing and signal processing as well as wireless communications and networking across all layers. We have seen the initial and incremental deployment of real sensor networks in the past decade, for example, the ZebraNet for wildlife tracking, the CitySense for weather and air pollutants reporting, and the Sensormap portal for generic monitoring services, to name but a few; yet the full potentials of such networks in the real world remain to be explored and demonstrated, which involves numerous practical challenges in diverse aspects. This special issue aims to summarize the latest development in the design, implementation, and evaluation of wireless sensor systems. We received a total of XX papers by the deadline of February 2010, and through a rigorous review process, we have selected 12 papers from them. The first paper “Ambient data collection with wireless sensor networks” presents a general survey of the current data collection designs for wireless sensor networks. It is divided into data gathering and message dissemination, which reflects on the many-to-one data collection pattern and the one-to-many control dissemination pattern. We classify the remaining papers into two categories: (1) system implementation, prototyping, and deployment; and (2) individual module/protocol design and optimization.