Whilst, if the objective is comfort, the system uses the blinds to control the light intensity and not the temperature, leaving this task to the AC.As showed in Scenario 1, the maximization objective restrains the system actions and decisions. The term ��decisions�� is used loosely as in the standard AmI systems they are only lightly proactive, with most of the system’s actions being the outcome of reactive programming. The reactive system provides fast response times and is very reliable, being used in most security procedures, although it lacks the ability to respond to new events and unplanned scenarios. One of the
Among the possible medium access control (MAC) techniques for wireless communication systems, the simplicity of random access schemes (i.e.

, ALOHA, carrier sense multiple access (CSMA)) make them suited to be implemented in several standards for short range applications [1,2]. Even though mitigation methods can be introduced in random access MAC (i.e., carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA-CA)), collisions are not completely avoidable. Nevertheless, some receivers have the ability to correctly receive a signal despite a significant level of co-channel interference, and collisions do not always lead to a total loss of the collided packets. This co-channel interference tolerance is called capture effect [3]. In the presence of concurrent transmissions at the same carrier frequency (collisions), packet capture may happen even for low values of the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR).

The first papers in the literature about the capture effect mostly consider Frequency Modulation (FM) demodulators [3�C5]. Later, the capture effect has been also Cilengitide studied in a variety of transceivers and MAC schemes, including ALOHA networks [6�C8], IEEE 802.11 devices [9�C11], Bluetooth radios [12] and cellular systems [13]. Focusing on IEEE802.15.4, several papers describing experimental results can be found in the literature [14�C22]. To give some examples, in [14], the packet capture probability of a Chipcom CC1000 transceiver [15] is measured with the aim of exploiting the capture effect for collision detection and recovery. Another study [16], carried out again with CC1000 transceivers, which work in the sub-1 GHz band, obtained a threshold for the capture probability for the case of one interferer, but unstable results for the multiple interferers. This early work seems to suggest that the number of interferers might have an important effect on the capture probability with CC1000 devices. However, in contrast to the previous CC1000 measurements, successive studies, carried out with Chipcon CC2420 transceivers [17], which operate in the 2.