Information Interaction in Wireless Sensor Networks Based on Socially Aware Computing Honggang Zhao , Xiufang Ma, and Chen Shi Xi’an Communication Institute, Xi’an, 710106, China hgz_nwpu@163.com Abstract. The integration of pervasive computing and social computing results in a new emerging research field - Socially Aware Computing. This new paradigm makes it possible to study Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) as a social network, in which the embedded sensors are the main entities as opposed to human beings in a traditional social network. Therefore, the combination of WSN and Socially Aware Computing holds great promise and challenge to use the sensory data to understand human behavior, human mobility, and ultimately to help solve human social problems. In this paper, we propose an information interaction infrastructure in WSN based on Socially Aware Computing, in which the sensory context is used to recognize a broad range of complex human activities and environmental situations. We also present the information interaction challenges for WSN integrated into the Internet and point out the future work in this area. Keywords: Wireless Sensor Networks, Socially Aware Computing, Internet of Things, Information Interaction. 1 Introduction Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are playing more and more a key role in many application scenarios such as healthcare, agriculture, environment monitoring, and smart metering. It is clear that the potential of WSN paradigm will be fully unleashed once WSN are integrated into the Internet [1, 2], becoming part of the Internet of Things (IoT). However, it is necessary to discuss how to resolve the information interaction problems faced by WSN integrated into Internet, in which sensory data is used to understand human behavior, human mobility, and human activities, and ultimately to help solve human social problems. This is different from the traditional sensor networks [3–6]. While the concept of social awareness has been developed in the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work for decades, the notion of Socially Aware Computation and Communication has only recently been raised by Alex Pentland [7]. The integration of pervasive computing and social computing results in a new emerging research field in computer science - Socially Aware Computing [8, 9], which aims to leverage the large-scale and diverse sensing devices Corresponding author. L. Sun, H. Ma, and F. Hong (Eds.): CWSN 2013, CCIS 418, pp. 71–81, 2014. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014 72 H. Zhao, X. Ma, and C. Shi that can be deployed in human daily lives to recognize individual behaviors, discover group interaction patterns, and support communication and collaboration [10–12]. Therefore, Socially Aware Computing brings new light to the research of information interaction in WSN integrated into the Internet. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 outlines the information interaction challenges for WSN integrated into the Internet. In Section 3, an information interaction infrastructure in WSN based on Socially Aware Computing is proposed. In section 4, the paper will describe some of the related work that was already done in this new area. Finally, section 5 concludes the paper pointing future research trends in this area. 2 Information Interaction Challenges for WSN Integrated into the Internet When WSN are integrated into the Internet, more complicated information is collected and mined to understand human behavior and ultimately to help solve human social problems, which brings the new information interaction challenges. Representation of Heterogeneous Information. When WSN are integrated into the Internet, heterogeneous information is collected from different types of sensor nodes which might measure different data and perform different tasks [22]. The nodes might have different sensors for monitoring the environment [13, 14]. Therefore, multi-source information fusion estimation methods should be given to represent complicated information [23, 24]. Interaction Between Various Sensor Nodes. In traditional sensor networks, all sensor nodes of one type are able to communicate with each other and build a sensor subnet. While in WSN that has been integrated into the Internet, many exiting sensor platforms have different radio modules and are thus not able to communicate with each other [14, 15]. Then the interaction architecture should be provided, thus the sensor nodes in different subnets can interact with necessary information [10, 11], which includes sensor node hardware details (e.g. chip, transceiver), sensor node software details (e.g. operating system versions), and dynamic properties (e.g. battery). Interpretation of Contextual Information. The sensor node context is the information which is not related to the real human behavior and human activities. This can be location, radio information and its capabilities [24, 25], which can only help to understand more about the sensor and its surroundings. Then data gathering and logical methods for context interpretation should be studied to understand human activities [35, 36]. The new generation of sensor nodes has realized the early vision of context awareness. The next step for WSN should be facilitating real-world impact of more complex recognition, moving toward next-generation opportunistic recognition configurations and large-scale ensembles of sensor nodes interacting with communities of human. When WSN are integrated into the Internet, they will collect and analyze data with an unprecedented breadth and depth and scale.