Embedded sensor systems are well suited to provide context data, i.e. any information which allows determining the context of entities (e.g. a user’s location, an object’s environmental parameters, or the number of people in a room). The additional integration of actuators allows interaction with the real world, e.g. control of heating, ventilation, or lighting. However, the big gap between the heterogeneous set of devices providing sensing and/or actuation needs to be bridged to enable smart context-aware applications. Special consideration hereby needs to be given to the efficient use of the available energy budget and the support for device heterogeneity. In this talk, means towards energy-efficient data transfer by applying header and payload compression for Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSAN) are presented, as well as our approach towards the seamless integration of WSAN nodes through using semantic self-descriptions and means towards unifying the access to node resources.

Who is Andreas Reinhardt?

Andreas Reinhardt holds a German diploma degree (M.Sc. equivalent) in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from Technische Universität Darmstadt. He graduated in 2007 on the topic of integrating deployment support functionality with reconfigurable wireless sensor network nodes. His current research interests lie in the area of ubiquitous computing, with a special focus on the integration of wireless sensor/actuator networks into context-aware systems.

The conference will be conducted in English