The objective of smart cities is to improve the quality of life for citizens by using Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The smart IoT environment consists of multiple sensor devices that continuously produce a large amount of data. In the IoT system, accurate inference from multi-sensor data is imperative to make a correct decision. Sensor data are often imprecise, resulting in low-quality inference results and wrong decisions. Correspondingly, single-context data are insufficient for making an accurate decision. In this paper, a novel compound context-aware scheme is proposed based on Bayesian inference to achieve accurate fusion and inference from the sensory data. In the proposed scheme, multi-sensor data are fused based on the relation and contexts of sensor data whether they are dependent or not on each other. Extensive computer simulations show that the proposed technique significantly improves the inference accuracy when it is compared to the other two representative Bayesian inference techniques.
Keywords: Bayesian networks; Kalman filter; context awareness and sharing; sensor data fusion; smart IoT environment; smart cities.