Guest Editorial: In-Network Computation: Exploring the Fundamental Limits

Some of the early work on in-network computation, a term that is being applied to this class of problems, was on the asymptotic analysis of the number of transmissions needed to compute specific functions in noisy broadcast networks. The development of geometric random graph theory and its applicability to wireless networks led to an extending of the analysis to large, multihop wireless networks. A second approach, which in some sense predates the preceding class of problems, considers simple, we may even say simplistic, networks with a small number of correlated sources. A third approach is to analyze the communication complexity of computing functions. The preceding is a sample of the extant literature and we launched this special issue with the hope of consolidating the area and also provide a launch-pad for new problem formulations and applications. We are happy to note that we have been reasonably successful on both counts and this special issue contains papers that advance our understanding of the fundamental limits and also develop several interesting new strands of research. And there are also papers that analyze the performance of in-network computation in specific application environments.