Research On Technologies Of Context Aware Sensornet

Dynamic feature and large scale deployment feature of sensornet demand sensor node's self-adaptability in terms of self-organization, self-configuration, self-coordination, etc. However restricted by the size and the cost, single node's processing ability is too weak to run sophisticated self-adaptive algorithms. This thesis plans to utilize the limited intelligence of sensor node and program the node properly to enable it process the simple self-adaptability. Though single node's ability is negligible, we argue that the macro self-adaptability of the whole sensornet can be viewed as the contribution of many sensor nodes' micro self-adaptability.To achieve such goal, this thesis integrates the theory of context aware computing with sensornet and proposes the concept of Context Aware Sensornet (CASN). Based on its capability, each node of CASN can get the information of environment. This information, together with other information collected by the node, can be treated as contexts. Based on the context available, a node of CASN can adjust its behaviors accordingly or request/provide relevant services. To address the problem of building CASN, this thesis makes the following contributions:(1) Presenting the concept of sensor societyDifferent from traditional human centric context aware systems, CASN is node centric and each node of CASN is expected to behave according to the contexts of the other peer nodes. However, sensor node is indistinctive from one to another. To abstract the subject and the object of "aware", this thesis proposes the idea of sensor society and presents sensor society model by applying the intelligent society knowledge learned from artificial intelligence research. Sensor society model abstracts the constitution and the behaviors of sensornet. It distinguishes single node from other indistinctive nodes. In sensor society, a node is a unique smart agent and has social roles which restrict its behavior.(2) Studying lightweight context representation technologiesContext representation is the basis of context aware research. Taking sensornet's features into account, this thesis focuses on context description and context storage technologies for sensornet. Borrowing the idea from ontology, this thesis proposes...