Wireless sensor networks are unattended distributed systems used to obtain detailed spatial and temporal information about a specific environment.  Applications for these types of networks include:

• Environmental monitoring and seismic studies
• Tactical surveillance and mobile target classification and tracking
• Green computing/data center monitoring (i.e. monitoring heat distribution within a data center and using that information to control cooling systems)
• Continuous patient vital-sign monitoring using personal body area networks

Wireless sensor networks are expected to be deployed in high densities, and therefore pose a fundamentally new set of research challenges involving design and analysis of self-configuration techniques, communication protocols, and data processing algorithms that are energy efficient, fault tolerant, and scalable.  This is a new and rapidly developing research area with many open problems of cross-disciplinary interest.