Coping with uncertainty in sensor networks

Abstract

Context aware computing is a computing paradigm in smart space that provides quality service by being aware of users and its neighboring contexts. Uncertainty in context aware systems affects the complexity of context processing and context collection mechanism. If uncertainty exists in a context aware application, user satisfaction in the application drops sharply making it obsolete. Environment monitoring with sensor network is a good example of context aware computing. In a sensor network system, since human intervention is not possible, the level of effort to eliminate the uncertainty greatly affects the reliability of the system. In this paper, we propose a technique to cope with uncertainty in environment monitoring with sensor network. We propose strategies to identify the source of uncertainty for contexts, to represent uncertain context information and methods to process such contexts. Experiments performed on an environment monitoring system shows stable monitoring performance of the proposed technique.