CPSWEEK

This volume contains the Proceedings of the 3rd International Symposium on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN'04). The symposium was held at Berkeley, California, on April 26-27, 2004.Information processing in sensor networks is an interdisciplinary research area with deep connections to signal processing/detection/estimation, networking and protocols, embedded systems, data bases and information management, as well as distributed algorithms. Driven by advances in MEMS micro-sensors, wireless networking, and embedded processing, ad-hoc networks of sensors are becoming increasingly available for commercial and military applications such as environmental monitoring (e.g., traffic, habitat, security), industrial sensing and diagnostics (e.g., factory, appliances), critical infrastructure protection (e.g., power grids, water distribution, waste disposal), and situational awareness for battlefield applications.From the engineering and computing point of view, sensor networks offer a rich source of problems that include sensor tasking and control, tracking and localization, probabilistic reasoning, sensor data fusion, distributed data bases, communication protocols and theory that address network coverage, connectivity, and capacity, as well as system/software architecture and design methodologies. Moreover, in all of these issues there is a need to consider many cross-cutting requirements such as efficiency/cost tradeoffs, robustness, self-organization, fault-tolerance, timeliness, scalability, and network longevity.This symposium takes a systemic approach to address issues from physical device design, to signal processing and from networking to coordination protocols. The Symposium places special attention to revolutionary new applications that are enabled by sensor network technology.Following the success of the first two Workshops that were held at the Palo Alto Research Center in 2001 and 2003, the 3rd International Symposium on Information Processing in Sensor Networks brought together researchers from academia, industry, and government to present and discuss recent work on various aspects of sensor networks such as information organization, querying, routing, and self-organization, with an emphasis on the high-level information processing tasks that these networks are designed to perform.This year 145 papers were submitted to the symposium, about twice as many as last year. Of these papers, 25 were accepted for oral presentation and 25 for poster presentation. Each paper was reviewed by at least three reviewers and on the average by four reviewers. The reviewing process was handled electronically, using the Editor's Assistant (EDAS) software. The final paper selection was made at the technical program committee (TPC) meeting that was held in Chicago with 23 members present. The decisions on oral/poster presentation were based on the topic of the paper, not on technical merit. The program chairs are indebted to the Technical Program Committee members for their efforts in putting together an outstanding technical program.