The vision of wireless sensor networks is one of a smart collection of tiny,
dumb devices. These motes may be individually cheap, unintelligent, imprecise,
and unreliable. Yet they are able to derive strength from numbers, rendering
the whole to be strong, reliable and robust. Our approach is to adopt a
distributed and randomized mindset and rely on in network processing and
network coding. Our general abstraction is that nodes should act only locally
and independently, and the desired global behavior should arise as a collective
property of the network. We summarize our work and present how these ideas can
be applied for communication and storage in sensor networks.Comment: To be presented at the Inaugural Workshop of the Center for
Information Theory and Its Applications, University of California - San
Diego, La Jolla, CA, February 6 - 10, 200