Using Wireless Sensor Networks to Narrow the Gap between Low-Level Information and Context-Awareness

Wireless sensor networks are finally becoming a reality. In this paper, we present a scalable architecture for using wireless sensor networks in combination with wireless Ethernet networks to provide a complete end-toend solution to narrow the gap between the low-level information and context awareness. We developed and implemented a complete proximity detector in order to give a wearable computer, such as a PDA, location context. Since location is only one element of contextawareness, we pursued utilizing photo sensors and temperature sensors in learning as much as possible about the environment. We used the TinyOS RF Motes as our test bed WSN (Wireless Sensor Network), 802.11 compatible hardware as our wireless Ethernet network, and conventional PCs and wired 802.3 networks to build the upper levels of the architecture