A framework of sensor-cloud integration opportunities and challenges

Abstract

In the past few years, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been gaining increasing attention because of their potential of enabling of novel and attractive solutions in areas such as industrial automation, environmental monitoring, transportation business, health-care etc. If we add this collection of sensor derived data to various Web-based social networks or virtual communities, blogs etc., we can have a remarkable transformation in our ability to "see" ourselves and our planet. Our primary goal is to facilitate connecting sensors, people and software objects to build community-centric sensing applications. However, the computational tools needed to launch this exploration may be more appropriately built from the data center "Cloud" computing model than the traditional HPC approaches. In this paper, we propose a framework to enable this exploration by integrating sensor networks to the emerging data center "cloud" model of computing. But there are many challenges to enable this framework. We propose a pub-sub based model which simplifies the integration of sensor networks with cloud based community-centric applications. Also there is a need for internetworking cloud providers in case of violation of service level agreement with users. We discussed these issues and proposed reasonable solutions.