摘要：Applications are always the driving force for research, particularly in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) area, which is highly utility-oriented. WSNs have emerged as a new communication paradigm for distributed real-time and embedded systems, where the energy consumption and the data process and storage capacity of the sensor nodes must be taken into account. Example applications include environment monitoring, emergency response, critical infrastructure protection, medical care, intelligent transportation, and smart manufacturing.It is our great pleasure to bring you this special issue on “Recent Advance on Distributed Sensor Systems & Applications”, which aims at presenting innovative and significant research on the design, implementation, usage, and evaluation of wireless sensor systems, applications, and novel techniques, especially in a distributed environment.We are deeply grateful for receiving many excellent submissions to this special issue. The review and revision processes for all papers were carried out in a rigorous and thorough manner. The accepted papers fall into various important areas of WSNs, including design, architecture, simulation, routing, security, and applications of WSNs.The first and second papers are survey papers. In the first paper, “Security in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks – A Survey” by Yi Ren et al., considering mobile WSNs as the new application trend, the authors reviewed existing work that provides security in mobile WSNs. Particularly, the survey emphasizes on data survival, forward secrecy, backward secrecy, authentication, and methods for sensor capture detection. A number of open research topics were also indentified and proposed by the authors to stimulate the exploration of new research work. In the second paper, “Wireless Sensor Networks: a Survey on Environmental Monitoring” by Luís M. L. Oliveira et al., a survey on environmental monitoring using WSNs and their technologies and standards was carried out. The authors analyzed a number of the most relevant environmental monitoring projects with real deployments, and draw some conclusions to identify the challenges that need to be addressed.The third and fourth papers focus on designing protocols for mobile WSNs. In the third paper, “The Improved WCMRP Protocol for Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks” by Ming-Huang Guo et al., the authors identified the problem that many existing routing protocols in mobile WSNs work well for sending message to single destination but not for multiple destinations. Motivated by some applications, the authors investigated the multicast service for mobile WSNs, and proposed an improved Weight-based Clustering Multicast Routing Protocol (IWCMRP) based on existing WCMRP protocol which as proposed for multicast outperforming in the mobile network. In the fourth paper, “An Autonomous Selective Cooperative ARQ Protocol for Hybrid Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks” by Nandar Lynn et al., the authors presented an autonomous cooperative ARQ protocol for a hybrid mobile WSN, which enables the distributed relays to cooperate in ARQ autonomously, consequently, increases the achievable selection diversity order in subsequent retransmissions.A distributed clustering algorithm, H-Cluster, was proposed in the fifth paper, “H-cluster: A Novel Efficient Algorithm for Data Clustering in Sensor Networks” by Longjiang Guo et al. This H-Cluster algorithm relies on a previously proposed mapping algorithm, HilbertMap, to map multi-dimensional sensory data items to positions in a 2-dimensional area and makes data communications for clustering highly localized in the network.The sixth paper, “A MACA-based MAC Protocol for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks” by Wen Lin et al., investigates the MACA (Multiple Access Collision Avoidance) protocol in long-delay underwater acoustic sensor networks. The authors proposed a new MAC protocol based on MACA protocol and greatly improves the throughput in the underwater WSNs.In the seventh paper, “IKM – An Indentify based Key Management Scheme for Heterogeneous Sensor Networks” by Manel Boujelben et al., the authors introduced a key management scheme for heterogeneous WSNs, which supports the establishment of pairwise keys and cluster keys to enable different communication patterns. The establishment of keys is based on Pairing Identity based Cryptography, a variant of public key cryptography. Security analysis of the proposed scheme showed its resilience to various types of attacks, especially the node compromise attack.Positions of disperse cluster heads are major limiting factors for WSNs lifetime. Biswajit Paul et al. investigated a two tiered disperse WSN in the eighth paper “A New Design Scheme for a Disperse Two Tiered Wireless Sensor Network”, and presented an algorithm to figure out the existence of disperse cluster heads in the network. Their proposed scheme LEDN can increase network lifetime.Due to the space constraint, we can only include a limited number of papers in this special issue. We trust that the two survey papers can give readers a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art technologies and challenges. We also believe that the other research papers cover the further research in both theoretical and practical aspects of the relevant topics.We would like to express our gratitude to the reviewers who provided the authors with important, timely and constructive feedbacks. We thank all authors who have submitted their papers for consideration for this issue. We also thank the staff at the JCM Academy Publisher for their helps in handling the manuscripts. Last but not the least, we would extend our appreciation to the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Communications, Dr. Haohong Wang, for providing us this opportunity to organize this special issue.
