Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have considerably evolved in recent years. Their main focus has been always restricted to the extraction of information from the environment, but only data collected by the network has been considered. All internal operations and challenges encountered in achieving the requirements assigned to the data have been ignored. However, the advances in the area of WSN, allowing their operation in scenarios under different conditions, make us believe that they are sufficiently mature and optimized to solve problems in other related areas. So, considering the WSN as an ideal laboratory to find solutions to several problems in wireless networks, this Chapter discusses how the advances of these networks may be useful to help the development and creation of smart environments, essential to make ubiquitous computing part of our everyday life.
TopUbiquitous Computing
Since its idealization in 1991, we would like to reach the level of technological development necessary to make the Mark Weiser's vision a reality. His vision is known as the ubiquitous computing, which can be characterized by the total immersion of computational capacity in people's lives. However, according to Davies and Gellersen (2002), only when we reach the level of pervasiveness enough for the ubiquitous computing be an integral part of our everyday life, is that we have made this vision a reality.
The main feature of this new computational paradigm is the change in the way of interactions between human and computers. For ubiquitous computing, computational intelligence can be found not only in computers as we know today, but also embedded in a variety of common objects we use in our everyday life. This immersion will allow the creation of smart environments, providing us services and computational intelligence at anytime and anywhere (Weiser, 1991).
Based on the theoretical foundation derived from this new computing paradigm, there is the need that research had driven to find for new technologies capable of ensuring the correct deployment of the devices in the environment, which can be transparent to users, and can operate together, in a coordinated and distributed way.
This subject has required that researchers find in other existing technologies, solutions capable of supplying the needs of the new applications to be implemented in these new ubiquitous environments. This need has resulted, in addition to the advantages and benefits of these technologies, in problems from every new concept that was incorporated in this paradigm. Some examples of the technologies ubiquitous computing have sustained is the distributed, embedded and real time systems, and mobile and pervasive computing (il Hwang et al., 2005).