Networked Sensing Information and Control

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.

In recent years, there has been significant interest and advances in developing systematic techniques to synthesize interactive and reconfigurable distributed sensing systems that are capable of performing effective inferencing and control tasks under overall resource constraints. Networked Sensing Information and Control is a collection of papers which present broad trends in the mathematical aspects of networked sensing, information, and control.

Recent advances in sensor and computing technologies have provided the impetus for deploying distributed sensing systems, which could find applications in building safety, environmental monitoring, power systems, manufacturing, national security, and space exploration. This technology is in the early stages of development consequently a number of issues need to addressed for successful realization of distributed sensing systems. This book takes a system-level perspective, presents some of the main mathematical problems and offers design solutions. The book is organized around four major themes:

• Blind Localization
• Distributed Computation over Unreliable Communication Networks
• Rate Constrained Field Reconstruction
• Dynamics and Control over Communication Networks

Written by leading researchers and engineers, Networked Sensing Information and Control includes motivating examples from specific domains such as national defense and environmental monitoring, but also provides fundamental theory and methods which are applicable to a wide range of networked sensing applications.