It gives us a great pleasure to present this 'Fast Track' section corresponding to the Fifth IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS) held in September-October 2008, in Atlanta, GA. Based on the submissions to MASS 2008 and the paper presentations at the conference, we identified a set of papers that addresses key research issues in multi-hop wireless and sensor networks, including algorithmic, operational and protocol-level challenges. The authors of these papers were then invited to submit an extended version for journal publication, and the extended papers were subject to two rounds of additional reviews by designated reviewers. At the end, five papers were selected for inclusion in this Fast Track section.
The five papers in this Fast Track section not only represent innovative and influential research on many aspects of MANETs and sensor networks, but also provide a good representation of the breadth of the research issues and challenges that our community is investigating. In particular, the papers address a variety of specific real-life problems (such as target monitoring in battlefields, fault monitoring in municipal mesh networks and detection of deployment borders), demonstrating the promises that mobile ad-hoc and sensor networks hold in playing an increasingly important role in supporting pervasive computing applications of the future.
The paper ''On Accurate and Efficient Statistical Counting in Sensor-Based Surveillance Systems'' by S. Guo, T. He, M.F. Mokbel, J.A. Stankovic and T. F. Abdelzaher proposes a novel computationally affordable mechanism for obtaining accurate counting information (e.g., the distribution of the total number of targets) in wireless sensor networks. The paper ''A Study of Overheads and Accuracy for Efficient Monitoring of Wireless Mesh Networks'' by Dhruv Gupta, Daniel Wu, Prasant Mohapatra and Chen-Nee Chuah evaluates the impact of monitoring overheads on the data throughput of mesh network, and degradation in the network performance, by providing several different techniques for reducing monitoring overheads. The paper ''Connectivity Monitoring in Wireless Sensor Networks'' by Mingze Zhang, Mun Choon Chan and A.L. Ananda proposes a flexible and efficient connectivity monitoring algorithm (H2CM) which includes components for hop vector distance based filtering, Bloom filters and signature hashing. The paper ''Self-Configurable Border Landmark Selection in Wireless Networks: Algorithms and Applications'' by Chong Wang and Hongyi Wu proposes three algorithms for border landmark selection, namely the Convex Hull-Based (CHB) algorithm, the Center Node Elimination (CNE) algorithm, and the Hierarchy-Structured (HS) algorithm
with improvements that could be applied to selected target applications. The paper ''Hydra: Efficient Multicast Routing in MANETs Using Sender-Initiated Multicast Meshes'' by Rolando Menchaca-Mendez and J.J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves proposes and evaluates Hydra, a novel multicast routing protocol for MANETs that establishes a multicast routing structure approximating the set of source-rooted shortest-path trees from multicast sources to receivers, without requiring the dissemination of control packets from each source of a multicast group.
We wish to thank all the authors for submitting their great work to this Fast Track issue of Elsevier's journal Pervasive and Mobile Computing. We gratefully acknowledge the efforts of our anonymous reviewers for their help and dedication in reviewing the papers and providing useful comments to the authors. Special thanks go to the Associate Editor-in-Chief Marco Conti for hosting this special section.