The advent of nano-technology and advances in communications has made it technologically feasible and economically viable to develop low-power devices that integrate general-purpose computing with multi-purpose sensing and wireless communications capabilities. It is expected that sensor networks will have a significant impact on a wide array of applications ranging from military, to scientific, to industrial, to health-care, to domestic, to environmental, establishing ubiquitous wireless sensor networks that will pervade society redefining the way in which we live and work.
Recently, in an attempt to integrate sensor networks in the fabric of human activities it has been recognized that it would be beneficial to augment sensor networks by either actuators or actors. Actuators are simple devices programmed to take immediate, one-shot, action in response to sensory input. Actors are more sophisticated entities that, in addition to actuating can provide a meaningful, long-term, interaction with the environment. This long-term interaction presupposes intelligent coordination with both the sensory data but also with anticipated changes in the environment. The resulting augmented version of sensor networks is commonly referred to as Sensor Actor Networks (SANET).
SANET 2007 has for stated goal to be a high-profile workshop that brings together state-of-the-art contributions on the design, specification, and implementation of architectures and protocols for current and future applications of SANETs.
