Information processing and data management in wireless sensor networks

The rapid progress of wireless communication and embedded micro-sensing MEMS technologies has made wireless sensor networks possible. Communications in wireless sensor networks are data-centric, with the objective of delivering collected data in a timely fashion. Also, such networks are resource-constrained, in terms of sensor nodes' processing power, communication bandwidth, storage space and energy. The special issue of Elsevier has 33 reviews by guest editors, which are divided into three categories, including data management, routing and security. Brayner has proposed an adaptive query processing mechanism to dynamically adjust query processing in wireless sensor networks. Akcan and colleagues have developed a distributed, weighted sampling algorithm to sample sensing data to reduce energy consumption. These papers represent an exciting, insightful observation into this important new area of wireless sensor networks.