Challenges and design issues in a distributed measurement scenario

In the last few years wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have gained an increasing interest in the scientific community due to their wide variety of applications and technical issues to be faced. Many challenges and design issues arise in this ad hoc scenario. In this chapter, some concepts are discussed having in mind a twofold point of view; the telecommunication researcher or GRID designer perspective and the metrologist or instrumentation and measurement designer one. Such mixed view allows pointing out aspects that are somewhat seldom considered and that instead could provide interesting results in both the above reasearch areas.