Context-Aware Service Ranking in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely used in practice for comprehensively monitoring and gathering physical information via a multitude of sensors. As the development of WSNs, the integration of them with the external Internet is a urgent need. By wrapping the sensor functionality as a WSN service, the Web service is considered as the most promising technology to incorporate WSNs into the Internet. The quest for selecting the service with the best performance promotes service ranking technology. However, due to the dynamic WSN environment, traditional quality of service (QoS) based ranking approaches for general Web services are no longer suitable for the WSN service. In this article, in order to fit the characteristics of the WSN environment, we propose a context-aware WSN service ranking approach by aggregating the user rating and WSN service context. First, the User QoS Assessment (UQA) and Context QoS Assessment (CQA) are proposed, respectively. Then, through the performance influence on the WSN service by the variations in their context, a Fuzzy mechanism is further developed to aggregate the UQA and the CQA. Finally, the experiments are presented to confirm the validity of the proposed approach.