Guest Editorial Networking, Sensing, and Control for Networked

THE accelerated integration and convergence of communi-cations, computing, and control over the last decade has in-spired researchers and practitioners from a variety of disciplines to become interested in the emerging field of networked control systems (NCS). In general, an NCS consists of sensors, actua-tors, and controllers whose operations are distributed at differ-ent geographical locations and coordinated through information exchanged over communication networks. Some typical charac-teristics of those systems are reflected in their asynchronous op-erations, diversified functions, and complicated organizational structures. The widespread applications of the Internet have been one of the major driving forces for research and development of NCS. More recently, the emergence of pervasive communi-cation and computing has significantly intensified the effort of building such systems for control and management of various network-centric complex systems that become more and mor