Grid architectures, which are viewed as tools for the integration of distributed resources, play a significant role as managers of computational resources, but also as aggregators of measurement instrumentation and pervasive large-scale data acquisition platforms. The functionality of a grid architecture allows managing, maintaining, and exploiting hetereogeneous instrumentation and acquisition devices in a unifed way by providing standardized interfaces and common work environments to their users. This result is achieved through the properties of isolation from the physical network and from the peculiarites of the instrumentation granted by standard middleware together with secure and flexibile mechanisms which seek, access, and aggregate distributed resources.

This book focuses on a number of aspects related to the effective exploitation of remote instrumentation on the grid. These include middleware architecture, high speed networking in support of grid applications, wireless grid for acquisition devices and sensor networks, quality of service provisioning for real time control, and measurement instrumentation.