"In case of out-of-band control signaling, signaling bits are sent in special order in a dedicated signaling frame. [...] In computer networking, out-of-band data [...] looks - to the application - like a separate stream of data from the main data stream. This can be useful for separating two different kinds of data."

"CC1000 (used in the Mica2 and Mica2dot platforms): Bug fixes and tweaks aside, there are two versions of the MAC for the Mica2 and Mica2dot's CC1000 radio: one version found on stacks before 1.1.3 and a version called B-MAC found on stacks from 1.1.3 on. Both are CSMA."

"A finite state machine (FSM) or finite state automaton (plural: automata), or simply a state machine, is a model of behavior composed of a finite number of states, transitions between those states, and actions. It is similar to a "flow graph" where we can inspect the way in which the logic runs when certain conditions are met. A finite state machine is an abstract model of a machine with a primitive (sometimes read-only) internal memory."

"CSMA/CA network: A network in which the medium access control protocol requires carrier sense and where a station always starts transmission by sending a jam signal; if there is no collision with jam signals from other stations, it begins sending data; otherwise, it stops transmission and then tries again later."

"In a variety of computer networks, binary exponential backoff or truncated binary exponential backoff refers to an algorithm used to space out repeated retransmissions of the same block of data. [...] After i collisions, a random number of slot times between 0 and 2i − 1 is chosen. For the first collision, each sender might wait 0 or 1 slot times. After the second collision, the senders might wait 0, 1, 2, or 3 slot times, and so forth. As the number of retransmission attempts increases, the number of possibilities for delay increases. The 'truncated' simply means that after a certain number of increases, the exponentiation stops; i.e. the retransmission timeout reaches a ceiling, and thereafter does not increase any further."

"...one hop is the step from one router to the next, on the path of a packet on any communications network (on the Internet often discovered with pings or traceroutes). The hop count then is the number of subsequent steps along the path from source to sink. The term "hop" can be seen in some networking based courses referred as "Hand Over Point" in routing terminology."

"Multicast addressing is a network technology for the delivery of information to a group of destinations simultaneously using the most efficient strategy to deliver the messages over each link of the network only once, creating copies only when the links to the multiple destinations split."

"A stateless server is a server that treats each request as an independent transaction that is unrelated to any previous request."

"A protocol stack (sometimes communications stack) is a particular software implementation of a computer networking protocol suite. [...] Strictly speaking, the suite is the definition of the protocols, and the stack is the software implementation of them."

"Octet refers to an entity having exactly eight bits. As such, it is often used where the term byte might be ambiguous. For that reason, computer networking standards almost exclusively use octet."

"Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) is a probabilistic Media Access Control (MAC) protocol in which a node verifies the absence of other traffic before transmitting on a shared transmission medium, such as an electrical bus, or a band of the electromagnetic spectrum. "Carrier Sense" describes the fact that a transmitter listens for a carrier wave before trying to send. That is, it tries to detect the presence of an encoded signal from another station before attempting to transmit. If a carrier is sensed, the station waits for the transmission in progress to finish before initiating its own transmission. "Multiple Access" describes the fact that multiple stations send and receive on the medium. Transmissions by one node are generally received by all other stations using the medium. [...] When the sender (station) is ready to transmit data, it checks if the physical medium is busy. If so, it senses the medium continually until it becomes idle, and then it transmits a piece of data (a frame). In case of a collision, the sender waits for a random period of time and attempts to transmit again."

"IEEE 802.11 is a set of standards carrying out wireless local area network (WLAN) computer communication in the 2.4, 3.6 and 5 GHz frequency bands. They are created and maintained by the IEEE LAN/MAN Standards Committee (IEEE 802). [...] The 802.11 family includes over-the-air modulation techniques that use the same basic protocol."

"The MICA mote uses an Atmel ATmega 128L processor running at 4 megahertz. [...] MICA motes come with 512 kilobytes of flash memory to hold data. They also have a 10-bit A/D converter so that sensor data can be digitized. Separate sensors on a daughter card can connect to the mote. Sensors available include temperature, acceleration, light, sound and magnetic. Advanced sensors for things like GPS signals are under development. The final component of a MICA mote is the radio. It has a range of several hundred feet and can transmit approximately 40,000 bits per second."

"Smartdust is a hypothetical wireless network of tiny microelectromechanical sensors (MEMS), robots, or devices, that can detect (for example) light, temperature, or vibration. [...] The smartdust concept was introduced by Kristofer S. J. Pister (University of California) in 2001..."

"A sensor node, also known as a 'mote' (chiefly in North America), is a node in a wireless sensor network that is capable of performing some processing, gathering sensory information and communicating with other connected nodes in the network."

"ns is popularly used in the simulation of routing and multicast protocols, among others, and is heavily used in ad-hoc networking research. ns supports an array of popular network protocols, offering simulation results for wired and wireless networks alike. [...] NS was built in C++ and provides a simulation interface through OTcl, an object-oriented dialect of Tcl. The user describes a network topology by writing OTcl scripts, and then the main NS program simulates that topology with specified parameters."

"NS (version 2) is an object-oriented, discrete event driven network simulator developed at UC Berkely written in C++ and OTcl. NS is primarily useful for simulating local and wide area networks."

"Because of the 802.11 medium access protocol, an interfering RF signal of sufficient amplitude and frequency can appear as a bogus 802.11 station transmitting a packet. This causes legitimate 802.11 stations to wait for indefinite periods of time until the interfering signal goes away. To make matters worse, an interfering signal generally doesn't abide by the 802.11 protocols, so the interfering signal may start abruptly while a legitimate 802.11 station is in the process of transmitting a packet. If this occurs, the destination will receive the packet with errors and not reply to the source station with an acknowledgment. In return, the source station will attempt retransmitting the packet, adding overhead on the network."

"EmStar is a software system for developing and deploying wireless sensor networks involving Linux-based platforms."

"The Media Access Control (MAC) data communication protocol sub-layer, also known as the Medium Access Control, is a sublayer of the Data Link Layer specified in the seven-layer OSI model (layer 2). It provides addressing and channel access control mechanisms that make it possible for several terminals or network nodes to communicate within a multi-point network, typically a local area network (LAN) or metropolitan area network (MAN). The hardware that implements the MAC is referred to as a Medium Access Controller. The MAC sub-layer acts as an interface between the Logical Link Control (LLC) sublayer and the network's physical layer. The MAC layer emulates a full-duplex logical communication channel in a multi-point network. This channel may provide unicast, multicast or broadcast communication service."

"Big O notation is useful when analyzing algorithms for efficiency. For example, the time (or number of steps) it takes to complete a problem of size n might be found to be: T(n) = 4n^2 − 2n + 2. [...] So the big O notation captures what remains: we write either T(n) = O(n^2) or T(n)εO(n^2) and say that the algorithm has order of n^2 time complexity."