Recent advances in sensor and computing technologies provide the impetus for deploying distributed sensing systems. Distributed networks are envisioned to provide real-time information in such diverse applications as building safety, environmental monitoring, power systems, manufacturing as well as military and space applications.
While significant research and development effort over the last decade in sensor development, physical layer transmission and networking infrastructure has laid the initial groundwork for practical deployment, realization of such distributed sensing systems is still in its infancy. The principle challenges from a systems-level perspective arise due to the difficulty in realizing the objectives of inferencing and control tasks for a distributed dynamical environment through an underlying power/bandwidth constrained ad-hoc networked infrastructure. The main challenge can be summarized as follows: How to make decisions under uncertainty, which arises from spatially distributed dynamic information when sharing distributed data is limited by networking constraints.
The book presents research on informational and mathematical aspects of networked sensing systems. The importance and timeliness of the book is evidenced by the explosion of several independent special sessions devoted to specific aspects of sensor networks in reputed international conferences. Despite these efforts the focus has been on specific and isolated aspects of networked sensing and there is a need for cross-disciplinary efforts to integrate ideas from the various research communities. The book presents research work conducted by internationally reputed researchers from control, information theory and signal processing focused on the common theme of distributed sensing, inferencing, and control over networks. On account of the contemporaneous nature of the topic, we have no doubt that there will significant interest evinced by the both the research and industrial community at large.