TUTORIAL T7 Networks for Measurement and Monitoring Systems Lecturers: Gabriele Gianini and Damiano Somenzi, University of Milan, Crema, Italy Monday, 17 May 2004, 9:00AM-1:00PM Gabriele Gianini Damiano Somanzi The continuous advances in micro-electronics are providing us with smaller and cheaper multifunctional devices which can be deployed in high number and with high densisties into new applicative scenarios, ranging from self-detection of structural defects by buildings embedded with sensors, to continuous environmental monitoring through "smart-dust" wireless sensor networks, made of of towsends of tiny nodes, from private area or battle field area surveillance by means of virtually invisible devices, to disaster area applications where, for instance, showers of moving sensor nodes assess the building damages after an earth-quake, or look for survivors. Scenarios such as those just suggested, pose however new and unprecedented challanges to sensor network designers: sensor network not only need to be highly fault-tolerant, but also highly energy efficient, they need to be highly resilient while operating in hostile environment, they must keep a tight synchronization and an efficient intra-node coordination, operate with high node densities and adapt to the continuously changing topologies. This tutorial will try to give an overview of all those challanges, organize them in form of different sets of requirements, suitable to the different applicative scenarios, show what current network technologies offer to face those problems (with special emphasis to the already established standards), explain why some of the current architectures are not fully suited to the different tasks, and give a general look to the work that is currently being done by the different research communities involved. Particular attention will be given to the key issues of internal and external network synchronization, which are at the basis of the network coordinate behaviour.