Efficient wireless sensor networks and integration into the IP multimedia subsystem.

The concept of context-awareness and consequently the acquisition of context information is an important research area in Ambient Intelligent systems. The fundamental objective of this thesis is to capture context information and make it accessible to mobile applications via a service platform by horizontalising access to a common wireless sensor network (WSN) space. In this thesis a design of an end-to-end system integrating WSN into a communication and service platform is described. More specifically, the work designs and specifies a WSN protocol stack architecture and investigates several clustering algorithm as protocol elements, as well as specifying how WSN can be integrated into next generation mobile networks and the IP multimedia service platform (IMS). There are 3 main components to the end-to-end system, the WSN protocol stack architecture, the gateway architecture and a context service enabler as part of the service platform. Each component is specified to a high level of detail and a test bed implementation shows the proof of concept, autonomously collecting context information from WSN. On top of this implementation a Mood based instant messaging application shows the interaction with a single application and the possible end-user benefit of such a system