IEEE Wireless Communications

Call for Papers

Wireless Sensor Networking

Recent advances in digital electronics, embedded systems, and wireless communications have motivated significant research in wire-less sensor networks (WSNs) from both academia and industry for its promising potential to support a wide range of applications in both civil and military areas. The applications include security and surveillance, environmental monitoring and control, target detec-tion and tracking, etc. A WSN consists of a large number of small sensor nodes with sensing, data processing, as well as communica-tion and networking capabilities. WSNs are characterized of dense node deployment, unstable sensor node, frequent topology change, and severe power, computation, and memory constraints. These unique characteristics and constraints present many new challenges to the design of WSNs comparing to the traditional wireless networks. Therefore, the primary objective in WSN design is prolonging node/network lifetime. This design objective must be considered not only at the physical layer but also at the link layer and the net-work layer in WSNs. The dense deployment of WSNs calls for an efficient MAC protocol subject to power constraints. Moreover, an efficient MAC protocol should also have good scalability and adaptability to changes.

Recently, UWB has been considered as a promising technology for sensor networks. Such networks combine low to medium rate communications (50kbps to 1Mbps) with ranges of 100 meters with positioning capabilities. Ranging via UWB radios is envisioned to be a major breakthrough to sensor networks due to its centimetre accuracy and low cost with low power. How to efficient use of UWB for WSN from different aspects, such as MAC, network, etc. is of great interest. On the other hand, Radio Frequency Identifi-cation (RFID) shows a great potential on market penetration to address present object identification systems. RFID and sensor tech-nologies are interrelated technologies. RFID technology, if combined with other sensors, may enable a range of other applications that can exponentially increase visibility and monitoring. However, how to address the co-existence of RFID and WSN, the common issues in RFID and WSN, such as power management and security/privacy issues, etc. are still need to be answered.

This special issue is to focus on the recent advances related to wireless sensors networks. Topics include, but not limited to:

Articles should be tutorial in nature and should be written in a style comprehensible to readers outside the specialty of the article. However, papers presenting original contributions will also be considered, as long as the presentation is accessible and the paper length is kept within the appropriate limits. Articles should not exceed 4500 words. Figures and tables should be limited to a com-bined total of six. For manuscript submission, authors should follow the IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine manuscript format described in the "Information for Authors" at http://www.comsoc.org/pubs/pcm/sub_guidelines.html.

Prospective authors should submit the all-in-one PDF version of their complete manuscripts via email to Professor Xuemin (Sherman) Shen xshen@bbcr.uwaterloo.ca.

Publication Schedule:

Submission Deadline: April 1, 2007
Acceptance Notification: July 15, 2007
Final Manuscript Due: September 15, 2007
Publication: December 2007

Guest Editors: Xuemin (Sherman) Shen, University of Waterloo, Canada. Email: xshen@bbcr.uwaterloo.ca
Qian Zhang, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China. Email: qianzh@cse.ust.hk
Robert Caiming Qiu, Tennessee Technological University, USA. Email: rqiu@tntech.edu