The activities generally termed "e-Science" encompass a wide range of scientific disciplines. It is characterized by highly intensive computation on huge data sets in a large-scale distributed environment, by the real-time interaction and collaboration among many scientists working on a specific problem or data set worldwide, and by the use of specific instrumentation-the pieces of equipment physically producing the data that pertain to a certain experiment.

In addition to remote instrumentation, this book also addresses new challenges that will arise from wireless access, wireless sensor networks, and the traversal of heterogeneous network domains.