Sensor Networks

Chair: Anish Arora and Jason O. Hallstrom

Program Committee Members

Sensor network systems have not only survived the peak of the "hype cycle" but have now emerged out of the "valley of disappointment" often experienced by new technological innovations. This is in part because the core systems challenges and application constraints have been progressively tackled by the research community.

Research in this area has been of special interest to the stabilization community over the past decade, and has been the subject of a substantial number of the papers submitted to the SSS symposia over the last several years. One reason for this interest is that, concomitant with the rapid pace of evolution of these systems and the growth in system complexity, are the challenges for dealing with the many sources of faults. Beyond the anticipated fault patterns inherent to the system class, hostile environments, limited energy reserves, and fault-prone hardware platforms yield unanticipated fault patterns. Moreover, as sensor networks become part of a permanent and critical monitoring fabric, uptime requirements dictate that the associated fault patterns -both anticipated and unanticipated- be addressed in an autonomic manner. Self-stabilization, self-configuration, self-recovery, self-adaptivity, and self-healing -mainstay topics for SSS- are important drivers for these systems. Likewise, the role of security, the use of formal methods, and topics in management have been pertinent.

This year, in keeping with the broader scope of SSS, the Sensor Networks track represents a new effort to bring together researchers and developers focused not only on identifying, analyzing, and mitigating fault/attack patterns unique to sensor network systems, but to more broadly address relevant systems issues. The intent is for the track to serve as a catalyst for the development of a new community that will help to provide the theoretical and applied foundations necessary to engineer, deploy, and maintain long-lived sensor network systems. High-quality manuscripts not previously published or currently submitted for publication are solicited. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Self-healing, Self-configuring, Self-recovery algorithms and protocols
• Application experience reports
• Energy management
• Network management
• Software architectures
• Integration of sensor systems with the enterprise and backend systems
• Programming across multiple sensor fabrics
• Distributed actuation and control
• Linguistic support and programming methodology
• Fault tolerance
• Sensor network planning, calibration, and deployment
• Root cause analysis techniques
• Security
• Fault detection, localization and isolation
• Theoretical foundations and limits
• Empirical studies