Wireless Sensors Networks (WSN) have spurred a considerable amount of research interest from various disciplines and application domains. They have been employed in emerging areas with high potential for societal impact, and are being used in plethora of biomedical, environmental and industrial applications. The processes of data gathering, analysis and information fusion need to employ efficient cooperation and coordination among tasks at different layers and abstractions – while having the constraint of energy-consumption on mind and, consequently, prolonging the effective network lifetime and its topology control.

A specific aspect of collaboration in WSN is the one with mobile systems. In many environmental application scenarios, typically there are much fewer mobile than static nodes, but the mobile nodes have much higher energy reserves, as well as communication range. Consequently, they can improve the sensing coverage and reliability of transmission – but they do introduce an extra burden: the management of the mobile units. In other application scenarios – e.g., structural health-monitoring and traffic management – the ratio of mobile units to static (e.g., on bridges or along road-side) in a certain area is much higher. However, in such settings, the mobile entities that have a collaborative role change much more frequently with time. Mobile and wireless systems offer a wide range of applications and services that are conducive to collaboration, and vice versa.

The International Workshop on Collaborative Mobile Systems and Sensors Networks (CMSSN 2013) aims at providing an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to present their contributions addressing various challenges in efficient management of the collaborative aspects in wireless and mobile sensors networks and systems. CMSSN will be held in conjunction with the 2013 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS 2013), providing a focused forum for presenting current results and visions in this emerging area.