Wireless sensor networking [Guest editorial]

riven by rapid technological advances in microelectronics , wireless communications, and embedded processing, wireless sensor networks have received tremendous attention from both academia and industry in recent years because of their promise of numerous potential applications in both civil and military areas. A sensor network consists of a large number of small sensor nodes with sensing, data processing, and communication capabilities, which are deployed in a region of interest and collaborate to accomplish a common task, such as environmental monitoring, military surveillance, and industry process control. Distinguished from traditional wireless networks, wireless sensor networks are typically characterized by denser levels of node deployment, higher unreliability of sensor nodes, asymmetric data transmission, and severe power, computation , and memory constraints. These unique characteristics and constraints present many new challenges for the development and eventual application of wireless sensor networks. Networking constitutes one of the most important aspects of wireless sensor networks. To realize the vision of wireless sensor networks, a variety of networking issues must be addressed, such as network architecture, medium access control , routing and data dissemination, topology control, time synchronization, and fault tolerance. With a large amount of research activities going on in recent years, significant research progress has been made on various aspects of wireless sensor networks. The purpose of this special issue is to expose the readership of IEEE Network to the latest research progress in the networking aspect of this hot and exciting area. The special issue at hand includes a collection of seven outstanding articles, which cover a diversity of networking topics in wireless sensor networks. In the first article, " A Wireless Biosensor Network Using Autonomously Controlled Animals, " Y. Li et al. open our special issue with an interesting topic. They introduce the architecture and operation of a biosensor network and present a simple but efficient routing scheme for this special network. In their article they also include the implementation of a backpack prototype used to capture and transfer video data. In the second article, " Challenges: Building Scalable Mobile Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks for Aquatic Applications, " J. Cui et al. explore the challenges in designing mobile underwater wireless sensor networks and use a top-down approach to study a set of new design intricacies at each layer. They conclude that building mobile underwater wireless networks requires interdisciplinary efforts, including acoustic communications, signal processing, and mobile acoustic network protocol design. In the …