ABOUT THIS BOOKIn recent years technological advancements in the design and fabrication of integrated circuits have led to the development of cost effective, low power, thumb-size devices that can be used for sensing/actuating, communication and computing. This trend is enabling a surge of new applications for which pervasive network architectures are being developed. A key feature of these systems is that they are decentralized and communication among different subsystems may be unreliable. From an engineering viewpoint, to ensure correct operation, the theoretical analysis requires a fundamental paradigm shift, as many of the typical assumptions of systems and control theory cease to hold.