Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Information processing in sensor networks

It is our pleasure to welcome you to the fifth annual conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks. Once again the response to the IPSN call for papers was strong -- the IPSN track received 169 complete submissions, while the SPOTS track received 52 papers. Submissions were received from 17 countries across 5 continents. During the late Fall and throughout the month of January, the TPCs worked to ensure that each paper received at least 3 detailed reviews. With this process behind us, the Technical Program Committees met in the Intel Research Lab on the CMU campus on January 27th to tackle the difficult task of creating a program. After a great deal of discussion, we settled on the program that you see before you -- while maintaining the 'single-track' culture of IPSN, we selected 23 oral presentations and 17 posters for the IPSN track, and 14 oral papers plus 6 posters for SPOTS.The IPSN oral presentations have been arranged into 5 sessions, ranging from the fundamental technical issues of sensor selection, placement, tasking, and data retrieval to mobile agents and routing. Notable trends include an increasing number of papers dealing with mobile agents. We also observed an increasing number of papers discussing large-scale applications, particularly with regard to various types of environmental monitoring. As in previous years, wireless sensor networking continues to be a strong interest in the community. Generally we believe that this year's submissions show an increasing maturity in the sensor networking technology -- an increased number of applications, while computer science research of increasing complexity is built atop emerging sensor technology.This year's SPOTS track was organized into five sessions, held on the third day of the conference. These sessions reflected the core themes of SPOTS, namely hardware platforms and sensor architectures, software frameworks and techniques, and testbeds and applications. Advances are evident, as these papers show platforms shrinking ever smaller, low power and energy-aware architectures being intrinsically embedded into hardware designs, miniature cameras becoming commodity sensor node components with resource-agile feature processing, and software suites growing more encompassing, enabling, and transparent. Large testbeds are becoming the rule rather than the exception, and sensor networks are expanding rapidly across application domains -- in this year's SPOTS, we see them mediating social environments, monitoring large structures, and at work on the farm. We were delighted to start with a different perspective on sensor network applications by launching the SPOTS program this year with a keynote talk by Angela Olinto from the University of Chicago. While the canonical keynote talk for a sensor network conference over the past years has involved some kind of earth science or environmental monitoring application, Prof. Olinto's talk takes us away from our terrestrial roots by exploring distributed detectors in astrophysics and the Pierre Auger Cosmic Ray Observatory. It wouldn't be an understatement to close by saying that the sky is no longer the limit in this field.In short, IPSN in particular and sensor networking in general remain strong and vital. Our sincere thanks are extended to the members of the Technical Program Committees. Many of our members have been now served for several years in a row, and their continued efforts are greatly appreciated.