Introduction to the special issue on self-adaptive and self-organizing wireless networking systems

Recent advances in wireless communications and networking, distributed sensing and control, and real-time and embedded systems have led to some new computing paradigms, such as ubiquitous and pervasive computing, wireless sensor networks, and cyber-physical systems. Many novel and attractive applications are made possible, such as advanced automotive systems, environmental control, critical infrastructure control, high confidence medical devices and systems, etc. In these applications, a large-scale wireless networking system that consists of massive numbers of connected processing elements, sensors, and actuators often plays a key role. The high complexity of such large-scale heterogeneous systems raises new challenges to the system design: We expect the system to be context-aware and self-adaptive to internal and external environments to achieve reliable and robust performance; to be self-organizing and scalable so that managing and maintaining costs could be minimized; to have programmable architecture and protocols for achieving optimal performance in different situations/scenarios, etc. These challenges need to be addressed