Naturwissenschaften (Dr. rer. nat.) im Fachbereich Mathematik und

ii iii Increased efforts towards device miniaturization have led to the emergence of a new class of ad-hoc networks, the so called wireless sensor networks. Individual devices or nodes are commonly battery-powered, small in size, equipped with a variety of sensors, frugal processing capabilities and a wireless transceiver. Spa-tially distributed within a deployment area, these nodes are able to autonomously form a network and cooperatively serve a specified task, for instance to acquire environmental data, to detect predefined events and/or to enable direct, physical interaction. Applications that rely on wireless sensor network technology are there-fore typically concerned with the investigation of phenomena that either spread over a large area, that demand for autonomous scheduling over a great period of time, that require unobtrusive mechanisms for data collection or immediate reac-tivity to observed states. A wireless sensor network can hence be understood a