Call for Papers

Journal of Control Theory and Applications

Special Issue on

Wireless Sensor Networks: From Theory to Practices and Applications

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is characterized by the dense deployment of sensor nodes that continuously observe physical phenomenon. The main advantages of WSN include its low cost, rapid deployment, self-organization, and fault tolerance. WSN has received tremendous interests of various research communities, and significant progresses have been made in various aspects including sensor platform development, wireless communication and networking, application signal and information processing, as well as network performance evaluation and design. Such work has established good foundation for WSN research and development.

The research and development of WSNs are stimulated by novel exciting applications. For example, WSNs, particularly the wireless body sensor network, make the old people/patient healthcare monitoring possible in smart home environment, where advanced signal processing algorithms are required to extract medical parameters like heart beat rate from raw sensor measurements such as ECG signal, estimation algorithms are required for occupant location and motion tracking, and machine learning algorithms are required for occupant activity recognition. The indoor environment (e.g., temperature and humidity) can be monitored by ambient wireless sensor network, and help design highly efficient distributed air-conditioning control system to improve the energy efficiency and enhance occupant comfort.

Such WSN applications must address a number of key technological challenges induced by limited network resources such as node energy and network bandwidth. As a result, the application algorithms should be resource constrained and the network protocols should be application-driven. Advanced closed-loop system can be expected as an integrated system solution to link the application algorithms and the lower layer networking protocols by means of control theoretic or optimization approaches. To be scalable and reliable, such algorithms and protocols should also be distributed in nature via node local processing and collaboration with limited information exchange to achieve complex overall network goal.

This special issue is a follow-up of the previous special issue on Networked Sensing, Decision Making and Control in Journal of Control Theory and Applications organized by Lihua Xie and Frank L. Lewis, which received warm responses. Different from that special issue, which mainly addresses the theoretic approaches for WSNs and networked control systems challenged by network uncertainties and limited resources, this special issue will be more focused on novel real WSN applications and application-driven research and development. Papers with real practices on platform development, network deployment, and system operational lessons or experience are particularly welcome.  Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: