With its origins in the early nineties, the subject of wireless sensor networks has seen an explosive growth in interest in both academia and industry. In just the past five years several hundred papers have been written on the subject. I have written this book because I believe there is an urgent need to make this vast literature more readily accessible to students, researchers, and design engineers.

The book aims to provide the reader with a comprehensive, organized survey of the many protocols and fundamental design concepts developed for wireless sensor networks in recent years. The topics covered are wide-ranging: deployment, localization, synchronization, wireless link characteristics, medium-access, sleep scheduling and topology control, routing, data-centric concepts, and congestion control.

This book has its origins in notes, lectures, and discussions from a graduate course on wireless sensor networks that I've taught thrice at the University of Southern California in the past two years. This text will be of interest to senior undergraduate and graduate students in electrical engineering, computer science, and related engineering disciplines, as well as researchers and practitioners in academia and industry.

To keep the book focused coherently on networking issues, I have had to limit in-depth treatment of some topics.