Abstract
Context-awareness has recently been considered as a viable performance leverage for adapting protocols to their deployment evolving contexts. In constrained-based Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), context-awareness enables sensors to learn about their contexts and automatically adjust their behaviors to improve the overall system performance. Most of the proposed solutions, however, dealt with the optimization of the usage of resources at the MAC (Medium Access Control) level. In this regard, context-awareness allows nodes to smartly adapt their behavior to achieve application requirements while maintaining a balanced trade-off between resources usage and network performances. We first review the most relevant work and proposals exploiting context-awareness at the MAC level, and then highlight the benefits of using context awareness.