Over the last two decades, the recent and fast advances in inexpensive sensor technology and wireless communications has made the design and development of large-scale sensor networks cost-effective and appealing in a wide range of mission-critical situations, including civilian, natural, industrial, and military, with applications ranging from health and environmental monitoring, seismic monitoring, and industrial process automation to disaster response, battlefield surveillance, and irregular warfare. Wireless sensor networking has attracted the attention of practitioners and researchers from both industry and academia. This type of networks consists of a collection of tiny, low-powered, less reliable sensing devices that are randomly or deterministically deployed to monitor a physical phenomenon and report their results to a central gathering point, known as sink.

Mission-oriented sensor networks are next-generation time-varying systems composed of both humans and mobile sensors (e.g., vehicle-mounted, human-operated, or integrated with mobile robots or UAVs) that collaborate and coordinate to successfully accomplish complex real-time missions under uncertainty. A major challenge in the design of mission-oriented sensor networks arises in supporting dynamic topology and disruption-tolerant architecture, caused by mobility, which has significant impact on performance in terms of sensing coverage, network connectivity, and information quality. In such dynamic environments, sensors should self-organize and reason in a distributed manner about resource allocation, scheduling, forwarding, caching, and in-network storage to accomplish specific missions, while extending the operational network lifetime. Another major challenge lies in accommodating human input. Humans are the ultimate sensors. They are well-equipped to monitor and report situations that would be very difficult for machine sensors to understand. They also come with their own challenges including imperfect reliability, bias, and relative lack of predictability (compared to well-calibrated sensors). The design of mission-oriented sensor networks, where humans and sensors collaborate, should account for trade-offs between several attributes such energy consumption (due to mobility, sensing, and communication), reliability, fault-tolerance, data collection latency, and quality of information (such as video resolution, picture quality, type of content, degree of redundancy, and level of summarization), and their impact on mission objectives. It should accommodate human-centric sensing modalities such as free-form text, pictures, sound, and video, and should include mechanisms to handle unpredictability, uncertainty, human error, and noise.

ACM MiSeNet 2012 aims to provide a forum for participants from academia and industry to discuss topics in mission-oriented sensor network research and practice. ACM MiSeNet 2012 serves as incubator for scientific communities that share a particular research agenda in this area. ACM MiSeNet 2012 will provide them with opportunities to understand the major technical and application challenges as well as exchange and discuss scientific and engineering ideas related to architecture, protocols, algorithms, and application design, at a stage before they have matured to warrant conference/journal publications. ACM MiSeNet 2012 seeks papers that present novel theoretical and practical ideas as well as work in-progress, which will lead to the development of solid foundations for the design, analysis, and implementation of energy-efficient, reliable, and secure mission-oriented networked sensing applications.

For More Information

Please send email to mobicom_info@acm.org with any questions or comments about the ACM MobiCom'12 conference or for more information. For questions about the ACM MiSeNet 2012 Workshop regarding the paper submission and review process, please contact the General Chair at zaher@cs.uiuc.edu and the Program Chair at hammari@umd.umich.edu.