Mobile Intelligence

13.4 WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Wireless sensor networks provide perfect platforms to study context-aware and context-dependent systems. Wireless sensor networks have been an area of active research since the early 1990s [11], accelerated by the advancement of wireless networking and the development of sensors. Only recently, wireless sensor networks have moved from academic research concepts to commercially available products, increasing production quantities.

Although significant research work has been undertaken, most of the research is still very application specific, with security and environmental applications dominating 12. However, it is likely that more generic and comprehensive approach is required, where true system-level problems in wireless sensor networks and their applications can be studied. With such a perspective, we developed a design framework in Figure 13.1 for wireless sensor networks [13].

In this framework, we have distinguished between context-provider and context-utilizer; the former is the reactive part that detects the surroundings and acquires the context and the latter is the proactive part that interprets and responds to the context. The interaction between the context-provider and context-utilizer constitutes a complete context-aware and context-dependent system.

Because the possibly bi-directional communication and the impossibility of restricting context to be a sensor reading, all nodes can potentially act as context-providers as well as context-utilizers. ...