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Future Enterprise- Sensor Webs
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| Written by David Hunter Tow |
Sensor webs or networks are collections of wireless processing nodes that can capture local sensor data and transfer it to a processing component which can be either local or centralised. The opportunity now exists for integrating sensor networks with the global internet to create a new class of applications, playing a role in social, environmental, industrial and resource management processes. Sensor nodes may be passive or smart nodes such as RFID tags as small as a grain of rice or speck of dust, equipped with their own micro processor, memory and wireless capability. Sensor nets can also play an important role in customising and updating mobile devices supporting applications that rely on a constantly changing environment or context, with the potential to create new location-based services-LBS. Such services can derive location information from many sources including GPS receivers for auto navigation or RFID tags applied to indoor item monitoring.
As mobile devices become ubiquitous they can also act as multisensor devices that provide coverage across cities, acting as dynamic points for collecting and sharing data and ultimately enabling users to benefit from a sensor-rich world.
Wide area wireless sensor networks move beyond specialised domains and can be shared across numerous pervasive computing applications including webcams on streets, wearable devices such as watches, mobile phones and car sensors.
A variety of sensor networks are now under development and are rapidly becoming a vital part of social infrastructure including- Mobiscopes, Urbanets and Worldwide Webs.
Mobiscopes offer the potential to build a federation of mobile sensors based on handheld devices such as mobile phones and cameras that achieve coverage over a wide area through mobility. They represent a new type of virtual communication infrastructure, the components of which can combine in multiple network topologies and are physically coupled to the environment through carriers such as people and vehicles. Community mobiscope applications include tourism, public health studies, traffic monitoring, identification of urban and environmental hazards and monitoring crime trouble spots.
Urbanets offer the elements to build large-scale, people-centric sensing platforms, allowing sensor and mobile ad-hoc networks to combine to create open sensory environments. People and communities can then share resources by allowing users access to urban sensor data.
Worldwide Sensor Webs- with the rapidly increasing number of large-scale sensor network deployments linked cooperative worldwide sensor networks such as Irisnet and Aurora are becoming a reality. Applications might involve early-warning data collection systems in the areas of public risk such as earthquake zones, monitoring carbon emissions or fragile ecosystems- applying sophisticated fault-tolerance, load-management and federated operation features for distributed data streams. Some systems have started to recognise the need to support integrated queries covering both live and historical data.
Future Trends
Sensor networks will become a standard part of the communication infrastructure meshing with the future internet and allowing realtime monitoring and sharing of global environment resource information.
This will be of enormous benefit to the future enterprise enabling realtime tracking and monitoring of enterprise resources and the deployment of new location based services.
It is amn opportunity not to be missed.
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