Wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs) provide sensor and actuator services through small smart nodes with very limited hardware and power supply. Information fusion must be considered a critical step in WSAN design, enabling energy saving, increasing data quality and deeper insight of the monitored environment. This study presents experimental results over real hardware on inner-node fusion in the context of the ZensSens system. ZenSens provides user-centric WSAN functionality, with IPv6 support at the sensor node level, automatic node attachment and suitable software tools for multi-channel access. This study presents some material about information fusion, the ZenSens system and possible solutions for inner-node information fusion based on real temperature sensor data. The approach proves the feasibility of inner-node fusion on constrained hardware with IPv6 support.

Smart nodes that sense the environment and communicate wirelessly to reach a sink node create wireless sensor networks. One of the main research challenges regarding wireless sensor networks is user deployment, namely in terms of configuration and management. On non-commercial solutions the user typically must be aware of the underlying technology to obtain sensing services. Internet connectivity is also desirable, so future deployments must take into consideration this feature, enabling realistic ubiquitous computing. This paper presents a user-centric solution for IPv6-enabled wireless sensor networks, using the Contiki operating system and Crossbow TelosB motes, featuring a Plug-and-Play like experience. One of the motes provides sink node capability to the network, through USB connection with a personal computer, which sends and receives data, presenting it to the user. A dedicated serial protocol for USB communication with the sink was developed and extensively debugged, featuring sink querying and network configuration. The current testbed uses User Datagram Protocol over IPv6, with 6LoWPAN, and IEEE 802.15.4 wireless communication between the sensor network motes and the sink device. A Plug-and-Play like operation is achieved through zero-user configuration, since the user only needs to plug in the sink and give power to the remote motes.

In modern organizations, the communication between collaborators is essential to improve productivity. There is a need for mobile collaboration tools that allow efficient collaboration among staff in organization which may be located in different geographical areas and time zones. Mobile and pervasive computing provides easy and convenient access to information, enabling effective collaboration. This paper describes a context and location-aware mobile application, called MP-Collaborator, created to improve and optimize the communication between collaborators in any organization. MP Collaborator draws information from location, user status and Pocket Outlook Calendar to create a user availability profile, which is published to any other user in the network. Based on availability status, the user can be reached using a simple phone call or a message. Through the opportunistic use of available mobile technologies MP-Collaborator provides a simple but critical service - user presence service. The proposed solution is validated both in terms of features and communication through a series of experiments on real devices through Wi-Fi network.

Wireless sensor networks span from military applications into everyday life. Body sensor networks greatly benefit from wireless sensor networks to answer the biofeedback challenges in healthcare applications. In such applications, data is of fundamental importance, it must be reliable and within easy reach. However, most solutions rely on a personal computer to process and display sensor data. In this paper we propose a mobile solution that draws on three-tier body sensor networks to dramatically improve data accessibility, through the use of a Java and Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone. The mobile tool features data monitoring and presentation. This approach allows data visualization by the patient or medical staff without a portable computer or specific monitoring hardware. We hope to contribute to the adoption of biofeedback for early detection of health abnormalities and lower the budget that governments spend each year in healthcare.

The paper discusses some new hardware and software tools that can be used for the design of virtual circuits based on dynamically reconfigurable FPGAs. With the aid of these tools we can implement a system that requires some, hardware resources R/sub c/, on available hardware that has resources R/sub h/, where R/sub c/>R/sub h/. The main idea of the approach supported by these tools is the rational combination of FPGA capabilities with some proposed methods for producing a modifiable specification, together with a novel technique for architectural and logic synthesis, which has been incorporated into the new design environment.

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