[agents] CFP: Special Issue on "Agent Technologies for Sensor Networks" in The Computer Journal

[Alex Rogers]

                       Agent Technologies for Sensor Networks

                               The Computer Journal
      
     http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/computer_journal/special.html

            Guest Editor: Dr. Alex Rogers, University of Southampton, UK


Overview
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Sensor networks are increasingly seen as a solution to the problem of performing wide-area monitoring and surveillance within many environmental, security and military scenarios. Such networks consist of multiple sensors, deployed over a wide area, connected through a communication network (wired or otherwise). To ensure minimal human intervention the sensors within these networks should be able to self-organise, autonomously manage their own resources, and co-ordinate their behaviour to achieve system wide goals.

The distributed nature of these networks, and the autonomous behaviour expected of them, naturally lend themselves to a multi-agent methodology, and many of the technical challenges posed by these systems (e.g. decentralised control, co-ordination, resource allocation) form the basis of main-stream research within the agent community. However, such systems pose many additional challenges, not least how to manage limited computation and energy resources, constrained communication, and unreliable or fault prone network components within a dynamic and uncertain environment. Furthermore, the increasing availability of sensor network data, and the need to make use of it in real-time for informed decision making, requires the development of intelligent agents that can autonomously acquire data from these networks, and perform information processing tasks such as fusion, inference and prediction.

Thus, this special issue will focus on research that extends and applies agent technologies, both within the networks themselves (where agents represent the actual sensors), and also for the collection and processing of sensor network data. As such, topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

 * Agent based management of sensor networks
 * Novel paradigms for sensor network management (e.g. game theoretic and market-oriented programming approaches).
 * Co-ordination and planning
 * Adaptive and learning agents for sensor networks
 * Energy and resource aware sensor networks
 * Emergent behaviour
 * Computational issues
 * Data fusion and aggregation within sensor networks
 * Reasoning with incomplete or uncertain information
 * Security and trust in sensor networks
 * Applications and real-world deployments of sensor networks
 * Agent-based architectures for sensor networks
 * Agent-based simulation of sensor networks
 * Reliability, efficiency, and fault tolerance

Important Dates
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Submission Deadline: 1st August 2009
Acceptance Notice: 1st November 2009
Final Manuscripts Due: 1st January 2010 Publication Date: To be confirmed

Submission Guidelines
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The work submitted must be in the form of high quality, original papers, which have not previously appeared in journals or conferences with published proceedings. Papers for this special issue should be formatted according to the journal style, and should be between 8 and 16 pages in length. The papers must be submitted via the journal web submission route (please indicate that the submission is for "the special issue on ATSN" in the cover letter) and simultaneously submit a PDF version of complete manuscript to acr at ecs.soton.ac.uk. Submitted papers will be peer reviewed according to their originality, quality and relevance to this special issue and the journal.


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Dr. Alex Rogers
Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
Electronics & Computer Science
University of Southampton
Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK.
Web: http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/acr/
Email : acr at ecs.soton.ac.uk
Telephone : +44 (0) 23 8059 9008
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