The wireless sensor network (WSN) is an enabling technology of ambient intelligence (AmI) where an intelligent system can sense the presence of and respond to the context or situations of people in the environment. AmI relies on the massive deployment of interconnected and distributed sensor devices to provide personalised services via intuitive interfaces and natural interactions in a manner consistent with the user contexts.

Cross-layer approaches have been widely used for WSN management and play an important role in designing solutions for protocol optimisation. The cross-layer approaches allow the sharing of information in a protocol stack across different layers for significant improvements on network performance and efficiency.

After an extensive literature review, it emerges that there exists research opportunities on cross-layer designs for WSNs in context-aware systems. Therefore, the research presented in this thesis is to develop a cross-layer optimisation approach for WSNs by utilising the user and environment context information from an AmI system. This approach can provide the resource-constrained sensor devices with the capability to understand the situations of their surroundings for the purpose of optimising WSN communications.