Context-Aware Sensor Networks for Smart Environments - Essay Example

In other words, context-awareness can be referred to as the external or internal state of the user (Lukowicz, Ward, Junker, Stager, Troster, Atrash, & Starner, 2004).

Context-aware computing in such a case explains the situation of a mobile or wearable computer and its awareness about the state and surroundings of the user and changing its behavior in consideration of this information. For example, context awareness plays a major role in Body Sensor Networks (BSN) since it makes an interpretation of the biochemical and physical signals emanating from the BSN based on the information about the user’s state and environmental condition. Context-awareness in sensing is an important part of the sensor network design because it helps a lot in the achievement of the goal of pervasive monitoring.

Three major approaches exist for deducing the context in a sensor network. These approaches include Artificial Neural Networks, Hidden Markov Models, and Bayesian Networks (Angermann, Robertson, & Strang, 2005). Research on context-awareness or recognition of activity by the use of these methods has been conducted in wearable and wireless sensor networks. Smart environments have several highly interactive and fixed applications and the power to automatically control these applications so as to meet environmental demands.

Smart environments have many benefits to society but they also pose very many new challenges about the design of wireless networks. Context-aware sensor networks fall in the category of wireless sensor networks and are therefore part of it (Korpipaa, Koskinen, Peltola, Makela, & Seppanen, 2003). This type of sensor network is created to collect information from the places of their deployment where their processing is being done, decisions are made and actions taken on the physical environment.

Context-aware sensor networks are useful in applications such as patient and environment monitoring, locating and tracking objects, security, and surveillance. There are fixed architectures for context-aware sensor networks.