Exchanging situational information in embedded networks

Wireless sensor networks have received a lot of attention in the past decade partially because WSNs can be viewed as the forerunners of ubiquitous computing solutions that are sure to emerge in the following decades. However the development of WSNs has not been as fast as expected, which is to a large extent due to the rigid architecture of the current WSN solutions. We are lacking solutions for creating distributed applications based on WSN technology. The current paper proposes that situation awareness of computing agents starting from the lowest level is one possible solution for creating distributed applications based on the limited computing nodes of WSN systems. The paper gives some suggestions how situation awareness can be achieved in case of resource constrained computing nodes. The paper also proposes a mechanism in the form of an appropriate structuring and encoding of data suitable for use by the WSN nodes. The proposed mechanism can be used for exchanging the situational data collected and created by the embedded nodes. The suggested approach is validated through experiments on a wireless sensor network.