The Internet is one of the great technology success stories of the twentieth century, enabling greater access to information and provided new modes of communication among people and organizations. Unfortunately, the Internet's very success is now creating obstacles to innovation in the networking technology that lies at its core. The size and scope of the public Internet now make the introduction and deployment of new network services very difficult.
Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are an important emerging technology in distributed computing. While the commercial viability of P2P networks is still in doubt, there is no question that P2P networks are phenomenally successful as a mechanism for file sharing. Despite their popularity, the current technologies and applications of today's P2P
networks are quite primitive. There are two major weaknesses displayed by today's popular P2P networks: inefficient network protocols, and impoverished query languages.
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have the potential to benefit society in a myriad of ways, such as accelerating scientific research, increasing productivity, and enhancing security. WSNs also pose many fascinating scientific challenges, ranging from device physics to encoding techniques to distributed algorithms. There is a large, diverse, and rapidly increasing network literature in this area. Unfortunately, much of this work has been done in isolation; all too often individual components are crafted and evaluated without an overall vision or a context for deployment.
