The emergence of 802.14.5-compatible wireless sensor network(WSN) technologies
strengthen the vision of intelligent building, streets and other environments,
which are able to supply users with specific up-to-date information. These
systems will provide an immersive integration of the human and it’s environment,
but to achieve this vision the networks themselves need a lot of information.
One basic information the networks absolutely need is time, since time can be
used to define the order of events, the age of other information and
synchronization points in time between different nodes of the network.
Therefore time has gotten a lot of attention from the scientific community.
However there is another very basic information, that is location. Location
defines the placement of sensor nodes in the environment. This information
again provides means to define detection ranges and further enhance the sensor
data that is delivered by the network. The location information can also be
used for routing in the network. In this case the location enables a user to
exactly define an area of interest in a geographical manner. This user provided
information enables the network to efficiently deliver the data from the
specified area of interest to the user.
Another dissemination mechanism uses knowledge on the content of the data
stream. The data streams are tagged with a topic to which users can subscribe
and to which nodes can publish. This communication mechanism is known as
Publish/Subscribe. The network tries to efficiently deliver the data to all
users, who subscribed on the appropriate topic.
The combination of both mechanism is not yet well discussed in the scientific
community. Therefore an evaluation of synergy effects may show further
optimization options for WSN.