Design of Embedded Systems for Wireless Sensor Networks

Dear Colleagues,

Embedded systems are meant to be immersed inside the environment, able to sense and act on it based on a predefined behavior and user needs. These devices are increasingly interacting with each other to improve the intelligence of larger systems, e.g., buildings, hospitals, production plants, farms and even cities. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are the core concept of this evolution when wired networks and stable links are not feasible.

Wireless sensor networks have recently gained new attention, moving from the traditional role of monitoring wild environments and critical infrastructures to the new perspective of  connecting everyday objects into the so-called Internet of Things (IoT).

Embedded systems represent the living tissue of WSNs, and their optimal design is critical for achieving compliant levels of reliability, efficiency and safety. When designing an embedded system for building a WSN, there are several aspects to consider: computational resources, energy saving, reliability, data security, and price. Designers must find the optimal trade-off between computational capabilities and energy consumption to increase battery autonomy or achieve energy neutrality. Vice versa, devices with higher computational and memory storage capability enable edge computing, producing ready-to-use data and saving bandwidth.

Finally, we think that the new challenges for wireless sensor networks applications are really low-cost devices and pervasive applications with the support of optimization techniques and artificial intelligence.

This Special Issue invites contributions in the following topics (but is not limited to them):

• Design of very-low-cost networked embedded system
• Design and deployment of wireless sensor networks
• Energy-efficient and energy-harvesting techniques for wireless sensor networks
• Automatic synthesis (generation) of network protocols and architectures for WSNs and IoT
• Optimization techniques applied to embedded systems design
• Testing, simulation, analysis and profiling of wireless embedded systems
• IoT architectures and edge computing
• Artificial intelligence and WSNs
• Design of novel sensors for WSNs
• Modeling, design and verification of analog-mixed-signal components for wireless embedded systems

Dr. Davide Quaglia
Dr. Enrico Fraccaroli
Guest Editors

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