Special section on Pervasive Networked Sensing

Wireless sensor networks represent a basic building block for pervasive computing. By offering distributed sensing, computation, and wireless communication, sensor networks lend themselves to countless pervasive applications. To date, wireless sensor networks have not gone mainstream, but they continue to offer exciting opportunities as a tool for domain scientists to sample their scenarios in both time and space. Though not entirely pervasive, wireless sensor networks do pervade the specific application scenarios they are deployed to observe and possibly control. This special section contains the extended version of three papers that were originally presented at the PerCom 2010 workshops. The first contribution, ‘‘Towards Real-Time Profiling of Sprints using Wearable Pressure Sensors, is an application-oriented paper. It describes the design, implementation, and deployment of an onbody sensor system for sprint training sessions. On-body sensor systems must be ergonomic and lightweight to minimize discomfort to the athletes. At the same time, they must also be highly robust as they are expected to operate on human bodies with very high rates of acceleration. High accuracy is essential, but so is affordability. The authors thoroughly present the design and performance evaluation of a system where inexpensive Force Sensitive Resistors on sensing nodes are employed to capture foot events. The second paper, ‘‘Rate Matching based Congestion Control and Fairness Abstraction in Wireless Sensor Networks’’, introduces