Real-Time Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (RT-WSAN)

Dear Colleagues,

Sensors, from smart home temperature-measuring devices to industrial multi-mode sensing instruments, are everywhere and are increasingly connected via wireless networks. Not only do they perform sensing functions collaboratively to display measured parameters on monitors, many of them are also integrated with actuators like thermostats while others send data and instructions to actuators to perform appropriate functions via a wireless network. Sensors may be endowed with low-power computing elements to perform data processing at the sensing locations (edge-computing) to reduce data traffic to a central processing site. Sensors and actuators can be stand-alone or embedded into larger and more complex systems. All these exemplary scenarios give rise to Real-Time Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (RT-WSAN’s), enabling the ubiquitous development and deployment of sensor-enabled smart systems. Wireless networks of smart sensors and actuators will revolutionize a wide array of application domains by introducing an unprecedented density and fidelity of instrumentation. They also present multiple system challenges resulting from timing, resource, power, and cost constraints as well as irregularity, mobility, scale, and uncertainty.

This Special Issue provides an ideal venue to address research challenges facing the specification, design, analysis, verification, implementation, deployment, use, and fundamental limits of these systems. RT-WSAN systems require contributions from many fields: wireless communication and networking, embedded systems and hardware, Cyber-Physical Systems  (CPS),  Internet of Things (IoT), energy harvesting and management, edge and fog computing, distributed systems and algorithms, data management, and applications, as well as cross-disciplinary work. This Special Issue aims to bring together researchers from academia, industry, and government to address challenges in building future RT-WSAN’s, with technical papers describing original ideas, transformative results, and real-world experiences. Successful submissions will motivate and describe why the topic is relevant to a vision of the future of sensing and actuating systems. Submissions will be reviewed and judged on originality, significance, clarity, relevance, and correctness.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Novel platforms, protocols, and hardware designs for RT-WSAN’s
• Novel communication paradigms for ubiquitous connectivity
• Localization, synchronization, RF, and RFID sensing
• Network and system virtualization
• RT-WSAN for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS)
• RT-WSAN for Internet of Things (IoT)
• Edge and fog computing
• Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) for RT-WSAN
• Low-power wireless media access control, network, and transport protocol designs
• Operating systems, network stacks, software systems, and programming
• Energy harvesting, conservation, and management
• Resource-efficient machine learning for embedded and mobile platforms
• Data management and analytics, including integrity, quality, and trustworthiness
• Learning algorithms and models for perception, understanding, adaptation, and mobility
• Machine learning on sensor data
• Heterogeneous collaborative sensing, including human-robot sensor/actuator systems
• Network security and privacy
• Fault-tolerance, dependability, and reliability
• Modeling, simulation, verification, and validation techniques and tools
• Applications, deployment, and user experiences
• Sensor data storage, retrieval, and processing
• Information theory, coding, compression, and scheduling
• Crowdsourced, outdoor, and wide-area sensing systems
• Health, wellness, and sustainability applications
• Smart city applications
• Computer vision and speech processing for mobile and resource-constrained systems
• RT-WSAN for autonomous land, sea, and air vehicles
• Wearable RT-WSAN systems
• Embedded machine learning algorithms for RT-WSAN

Submitted articles should not have been previously published or currently under review by other journals or conferences/symposia/workshops. Papers previously published as part of conference/workshop proceedings can be considered for publication in the Special Issue provided that they are modified to contain at least 40% new content. Authors of such submissions must clearly indicate how the journal version of their paper has been extended in a separate letter to the guest editors at the time of submission. Moreover, authors must acknowledge their previous paper in the manuscript and resolve any potential copyright issues prior to submission.

Best wishes and I look forward to your exciting contributions!

Prof. Dr. Albert M.K. Cheng
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks
• Real-Time and Embedded Systems
• Real-Time Machine Learning Networks and Systems
• Cyber-Physical Systems
• Internet of Things
• Network and System Virtualization
• Functional Reactive Systems
• Secure Embedded Networks and Systems
• Knowledge-Based Systems, Edge and Fog Computing