Abstract

Serie : Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 5859 The amount of seniors in need of constant care is rapidly rising: an evident consequence of population ageing. There are already some monitorization environments which aim to monitor these persons while they remain at home. This, however, although better than delocalizing the elder to some kind of institution, may not still be the ideal solution, as it forces them to stay inside the home more than they wished, as going out means lack of accompaniment and a consequent sensation of fear. In this paper we propose EMon: a monitorization device small enough to be worn by its users, although powerful enough to provide the higher level monitorization systems with vital information about the user and the environment around him. We hope to allow the representation of an intelligent environment to move with its users, instead of being static, mandatorily associated to a single physical location. The first prototype of EMon, as presented in this paper, provides environmental data as well as GPS coordinates and pictures that are useful to describe the context of its user. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Abstract

In the new era of Ambient Intelligence, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are seen to bridge the gap between physical world and the Internet, making a large amount of information accessible anywhere, anytime. Over the last few years, WSNs are being developed towards a large number of multimedia streaming applications, e.g. video surveillance, traffic control systems, health monitoring, and industrial process control. WSNs consist of small sensor devices (nodes) that are capable of working unattended, without centralized control, under dynamically changing conditions. However, these devices face important limitations in terms of energy, memory and computational power. The uncontrolled use of limited resources in conjunction with the unpredictable nature of WSNs in terms of traffic load injection, wireless link capacity fluctuations and topology modifications may lead to congestion. Congestion can cause increased packet loss and delay. This paper proposes a bio-inspired congestion control approach for WSNs streaming applications that necessitate controlled performance with graceful degradation. In the proposed approach, congestion in WSNs is prevented (or at least minimized) by regulating the rate of each traffic flow based on the Lotka-Volterra competition model. Performance evaluations reveal that the proposed approach achieves adaptability to changing traffic loads, scalability and fairness among flows, while providing graceful performance degradation as the offered load increases. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 33 17 2039 2047 "p"Cited By :20