Reconfigurable Sensor Networks

Dear Colleagues,

The last few years have witnessed a significant interest in wireless sensor networks. Recent advancements in communication technology, cloud computing, and computing hardware have accelerated this interest. This increasing interest is evident by virtue of the vast applications that are emerging in a wide range of areas, including disaster management, habitat protection and monitoring, healthcare, intelligent transportation, unmanned vehicles, border protection, combat field reconnaissance, and security surveillance.

Sensor networks are typically composed of a large number of sensor nodes that are limited in resources, such as energy, memory, computational power, and communication. They tend to be deployed in adversarial, harsh, and dynamic unattended environments. This makes the ability of these networks to reconfigure themselves, at the node level as well as at the network level, both a necessity and an advantage. Firstly, their resource limitations cause them to be vulnerable, especially when operating in harsh and dynamic environments. This vulnerability often manifests itself in disconnected or dead nodes and/or disconnected topology. Therefore, in order for sensor networks to mitigate this shortcoming, they must possess the ability to reconfigure themselves, at the node level and at the network level. Furthermore, there are many applications where the network must maintain an adequate degree of recofigurability, functionally and topologically, in order to accomplish its mission. Secondly, the inherent node redundancy of these networks, due to their large scale and their distributed nature, makes recofigurability not just a must-have survival characteristic, but also an ability to empower the network to accomplish its tasks highly efficiently and effectively, as it fosters and facilitates cooperation, adaptation, and smartness.

The objective of this Special Issue on Reconfigurable Sensor Networks is to disseminate the results of research work conducted on this topic based on a peer-review process. Related topics of interest include (but are not limited to): 

• Collaborative strategies, control, and decision making;
• Strategies for fault-tolerance and recovery;
• Biologically inspired reconfigurable sensor networks;
• Unpowered reconfigurable sensor networks;
• Context-aware reconfigurable sensing;
• Self-organizing sensor networks;
• Collaborative in-network processing;
• Reconfigurable mechanisms and strategies for sensor fusion;
• Topology and mobility management;
• Tiny OSs and reconfigurability;
• Architectural issues;
• Emerging AI algorithms in reconfigurable sensor networks;
• Reconfigurable behavior in heterogeneous sensor networks;
• Blockchain-based privacy and security management in reconfigurable sensor networks;
• Applications including but not limited to: Surveillance, habitat protection and monitoring, intrusion detection, body area networks, target tracking, and next-generation power grids.

Prof. Dr. Otman A. Basir
Guest Editor

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