We anticipate the next wave in the information technology revolution to be the convergence of control, i.e., sensing and actuation, with communication and computing. This dissertation addresses the broad set of issues that we believe to be important to the design, implementation, and proliferation of such systems. In particular, we expound on the topics of the architecture of such systems, methodologies for design, distributed time, services, and middleware. We describe our design and implementation of a testbed.iii To my family ACKNOWLEDGMENTS