Over the last two decades, the recent and fast advances in inexpensive sensor technology and wireless communications has made the design and development of large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs) cost-effective and appealing to a wide range of mission-critical situations, including civilian, natural, industrial, and military applications, such as health and environmental monitoring, seism monitoring, industrial process automation, and battlefields surveillance. Wireless sensor networking has attracted the attention of practitioners and researchers from both industry and academia. This type of networks consists of a collection of tiny, resource-limited, low-reliable sensing devices that are randomly or deterministically deployed in a field of interest to monitor a physical phenomenon and report their results to a central gathering point, known as a sink. These sensing devices suffer from their scarce capabilities, such as bandwidth, storage, CPU, battery power (or energy), sensing, and communication. In particular, mission-oriented WSNs are viewed as time-varying systems composed of autonomous mobile sensing devices (e.g., using mobile robots) that collaborate and coordinate distributedly to successfully accomplish complex real-time missions under uncertainty. The major challenge in the design of mission-oriented WSNs is due to their dynamic topology and architecture, which is caused mainly by sensing devices mobility. The latter may have significant impact on the performance of mission-oriented WSNs in terms of their sensing coverage and network connectivity. In such continuously dynamic environments, sensing devices should self-organize and move purposefully to accomplish any mission in their deployment field while extending the operational network lifetime. In particular, the design of mission-oriented WSNs should account for trade-offs between several attributes, such energy consumption (due to mobility, sensing, and communication), reliability, fault-tolerance, and delay.

IEEE MiSeNet 2016 will aim to provide a forum for participants from academia and industry to discuss topics in mission-oriented WSNs research and practice. IEEE MiSeNet 2016 will serve as incubator for scientific communities that share a particular research agenda in the area of mission-oriented WSNs. IEEE MiSeNet 2016 will provide its participants with opportunities to understand the major technical and application challenges of mission-oriented WSNs as well as exchange and discuss scientific and engineering ideas related to their architecture, protocol, algorithm, and application design, in particular at a stage before they have matured to warrant conference/journal publications. IEEE MiSeNet 2016 will seek papers that present novel theoretical and practical ideas as well as work in-progress, which will lead to the development of solid foundations for the design, analysis, and implementation of energy-efficient, reliable, and secure mission-oriented WSN applications.