Infrastructure for Data Processing in Large-Scale Interconnected Sensor Networks

TLDR

With falling wireless sensor costs, large autonomous sensor networks will be deployed, and interconnecting them is needed to realize a global sensor Internet. The paper introduces GSN, a flexible middleware that abstracts heterogeneous sensor networks, enabling rapid deployment, efficient distributed query processing, sensor mobility support, and runtime dynamic configuration with minimal effort. GSN is built on a conceptual model with abstractions and architecture that support distributed query processing and dynamic configuration, and its implementation was shown to be efficient in high‑load experiments. The GSN implementation is available at http://gsn.sourceforge.net/.

Abstract

With the price of wireless sensor technologies diminishing rapidly we can expect large numbers of autonomous sensor networks being deployed in the near future. These sensor networks will typically not remain isolated but the need of interconnecting them on the network level to enable integrated data processing will arise, thus realizing the vision of a global "sensor Internet." This requires a flexible middleware layer which abstracts from the underlying, heterogeneous sensor network technologies and supports fast and simple deployment and addition of new platforms, facilitates efficient distributed query processing and combination of sensor data, provides support for sensor mobility, and enables the dynamic adaption of the system configuration during runtime with minimal (zero-programming) effort. This paper describes the global sensor networks (GSN) middleware which addresses these goals. We present GSN's conceptual model, abstractions, and architecture, and demonstrate the efficiency of the implementation through experiments with typical high-load application profiles. The GSN implementation is available from http://gsn.sourceforge.net/.