ERCIM News 76
January 2009
Special theme The Sensor Web
Guest editors Mark Roantree ( Dublin City University) and Mikko Sallinen (VTT)
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by Mark Roantree and Mikko Sallinen
One of the truly multidisciplinary research efforts involving computer scientists revolves around the topic of sensor networks. It brings together chemists who develop the sensors, engineers focusing on wireless platforms and other hardware components, and the computer scientists who develop the services, knowledge layers and middleware. In many cases, research must also include the knowledge workers associated with the specific domain, many of whom are represented in the articles in this issue of ERCIM News. In almost all cases, some aspect of the research will seek to create a bridge or bidirectional channel between the physical world of the planet, its people and the sensors, and the digital world of computers and their software applications.
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by Steven D. Glaser and Tommi Parkkila
At the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, University of California, Berkeley, USA, we have been developing and deploying wireless sensor systems for ten years. We have focused on solutions to societal needs. As we ask more and more from our 'motes' and their low-power networks, we foresee important applications for sensor and control networks that will require a more powerful and flexible solution.
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by Gerald Wagenknecht, Markus Anwander and Torsten Braun
A heterogeneous wireless sensor network (WSN) contains different types of sensor nodes. To operate such a WSN, we present MARWIS (Management ARchitecture for WIreless Sensor Networks). It uses a wireless mesh network as a backbone and offers mechanisms for visualization, monitoring, reconfiguration and updating program code.
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Wireless sensor networks may well be the next big thing. Nevertheless, a fully business-process-integrated infrastructure for deploying large numbers of sensors and actuators requires a well-designed ecosystem. This should combine inexpensive devices with simple, bulletproof device programmability for easy integration and use by application domain specialists. The IBM Mote Runner system addresses this challenge with a high-performance, low-footprint middleware platform comprising a hardware-agnostic and language-independent virtual machine together with development and integration tooling to easily create and manage applications for open sensor and actuator networks.
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by Thomas Usländer and Kym Watson
Working towards 'plug and measure' in sensor networks for environmental monitoring with Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards, the SANY (Sensors Anywhere) project specifies an architecture for all kinds of fixed and moving sensors. This will allow both seamless plug-and-measure capability for sensors in the field, and sharing of information between sensor networks.
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by Rob Brennan
Deploying sensor networks in the built environment is not enough to produce smart buildings. How can we avoid creating silos of application-specific sensor networks? How can we publish the sensor data in secure, reusable and flexible ways? Can we support end-to-end provisioning of these sensor networks as an integral part of the building from requirements collection through design, procurement, construction, commissioning and facilities management operations?
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by Andrew Woolf
An explosion in the instrumentation of our environment using sensors of all descriptions is driving the development of infrastructure to manage the wealth of information they collect. The Sensor Web aims to simplify the publication of, and access to, sensor resources, just as the World Wide Web has done for documents. And, as with the WWW, the Sensor Web relies on new information and communication standards for structuring sensor information and its exchange.
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by R Harrison, F Jammes, H Smit and T Kirkham
Increased access to device-level automation components is closing the final gap in the enterprise computing model.
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by Václav Matyáš and Petr Švenda
Researchers at Masaryk University, Brno, are working on security issues relating to large-scale, highly distributed and relatively dense wireless sensor networks.
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by Marek Klonowski, Michał Koza and Mirosław Kutyłowski
Recent work carried out at Wroclaw University of Technology shows that a fair level of security can be achieved for wireless sensor networks without heavy cryptographic technology.
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by Johanna Kallio and Juhani Latvakoski
In the near future, there will be many more embedded devices than there are mobile phones. When these devices are connected to the Internet, many novel kinds of ubiquitous service will be enabled.
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by Mikko Sallinen, Esko Strömmer and Pirkka Tukeva
Short-range communication technology is proving its worth in many areas of application. Here we illustrate three case studies involving NFC (Near-Field Communication) and Nanonet radio technology. These include a consumer application with the TouchMe paradigm, and professional applications for force measurements on train wheels and acceleration measurements on the axis of a paper mill machine. We also show the advantages of these short-range communication technologies and discuss other potential applications.
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by Gregory O'Hare, Mauro Dragone and Jennifer Treanor
The CLARITY Centre for Sensor Web Technology in Ireland is currently constructing a ubiquitous robotics testbed by integrating a collective of mobile robots with a wireless sensor network and a number of portable devices. The new, mixed testbed will be hosted at the School of Computer Science and Informatics at University College Dublin, (UCD), and will also avail itself of the laboratory facilities hosted in Dublin City University (DCU) and Tyndall, Cork. The testbed will provide a service for all researchers interested in developing ubiquitous robot applications.
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by Paul Couderc and Michel Banâtre
The upcoming radio frequency indentification (RFID) revolution will undoubtedly contribute to the blending of the information society with the physical world: while common 'communicating objects' are currently restricted to complex electronic devices such as cell phones, cameras etc, RFID is in fact able to promote anything as a communicating object. In such a new world, data will not necessarily always flow into computers and networks, but may be physically retained by objects moving in real space.
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by Manfred Bortenschlager, Elisabeth Haid and Andreas Wagner
Sensor technology has the potential to boost productivity just as the Internet did. We demonstrate the opportunities presented by sensors and sensor network technology by deploying a corresponding framework in an indoor environmental quality application. Our framework is based on OGC Sensor Web standards and exploits SunSPOT sensor technology for rapid prototyping.
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by Jer Hayes, Greg O'Hare, Harry Kolar and Dermot Diamond
The ultimate goal of environmental sensor networks is to realize the concept of an 'adaptive environment' - one that senses and rapidly adapts to potential incidents in order to minimize their impact.
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by Thiemo Voigt, Nicolas Tsiftes and Zhitao He
Sensor networks enable remote monitoring of natural environments such as glaciers, volcanoes and bodies of water. Within the project 'Sensor Networks to Monitor Marine Environment with Particular Focus on Climate Changes', SICS and partners are designing and implementing flexible, reprogrammable sensor network solutions suitable for monitoring the marine environment with high resolution in time and space.
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by Gerald Schimak and Denis Havlik
The increasing frequency, severity and consequences in Europe of floods, storms, forest fires and other natural hazards sensitive to climate change has clearly shown the shortcomings of existing environmental monitoring and information systems. The observed inefficiency is primarily a consequence of historical and organizational factors. An exorbitant amount of work on data and service standardization would be required to build more efficient information systems using state-of-the-art technology.
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by Evangelos Mangas and Angelos Bilas
Sensor localization is an important component and enabler of many applications using intelligent sensors. FLASH is a system that achieves fine-grained localization using acoustic sounds and high-precision clock synchronization via radio frequency (RF) communication. Sensors can dynamically localize themselves in space by maintaining synchronized clocks and measuring time of arrival for acoustic sound pulses. Our techniques focus on achieving highly accurate synchronization and consistent sound detection. Furthermore, FLASH does not require external infrastructure such as fixed equipment, specialized hardware support, or great resource consumption. Experimental results show that FLASH localization is accurate to within 11cm in a variety of indoor environments.
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by Stefano Savazzi, Vittorio Rampa and Umberto Spagnolini
Strong fluctuations in crude oil prices and the expected production peak of current reservoirs are pushing oil companies to increase their investment in seismic exploration. Replacing cabling with wireless technology should radically improve the quality of depth imaging and simplify acquisition logistics. Recent advances in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) now allow the wireless community to satisfy the rigid constraints imposed by seismic acquisition systems, which have a large number of sensors (> 10 000) over the monitoring area (> 5km2).
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by Thomas Sarmis, Xenophon Zabulis and Antonis A. Argyros
Applications related to vision-based monitoring of spaces and to the visual understanding of human behaviour, require the synchronous imaging of a scene from multiple views. We present the design and implementation of a software platform that enables synchronous acquisition of images from a camera network and supports their distribution across computers. Seamless and online delivery of acquired data to multiple distributed processes facilitates the development of parallel applications. As a case study, we describe the use of the platform in a vision system targeted at unobtrusive human-computer interaction.
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by Eric Pauwels, Albert Salah and Paul de Zeeuw
Sensor networks are increasingly finding their way into our living environments, where they perform a variety of tasks like surveillance, safety or resource monitoring. Progress in standardization and communication protocols has made it possible to communicate and exchange data in an ad hoc fashion, thus creating extended and heterogeneous multimodal sensor networks. CWI is looking at ways to automatically propagate semantic information across sensor modalities.
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by Aiden R. Doherty and Alan F. Smeaton
We describe a wearable sensor technology that passively records 'lifelog' images and sensor readings of a wearer's daily life. The focus of our work is not on aggregating, collecting or networking data as in the usual application of sensors in the Sensor Web, but rather on detecting events of interest to the wearer from a multi-sensor standalone device. These events of interest provide effective cues to allow people to more easily access their autobiographical memories. Early research indicates this technology may be potentially helpful for sufferers of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's.
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by Wolfgang Herzner
The SENSE project (Smart Embedded Network of Sensing Entities) is developing methods, tools and a test platform for the design, implementation and operation of smart adaptive wireless networks of stationary embedded sensing components. The network is an ambient intelligent system, which adapts to its environment and delivers reliable information to its component sensors and the user.
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by Giuseppe Amato, Stefano Chessa, Francesco Furfari, Stefano Lenzi, Claudio Vairo
The convergence of sensor networks with the Web (Sensor Web) poses new problems. These relate both to the management of the enormous amounts of data continuously produced by sensors, and to the reaction to events inferred from such data. The MaD-WiSe system (MAnagement of Data in WIreless SEnsor networks), developed at ISTI-CNR, exploits the well-known database paradigm to address this issue.
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by Tanja Radu, Cormac Fay, King Tong Lau and Dermot Diamond
The aim of this project is the development of integrated smart wearable sensors for emergency disaster intervention personnel. The CLARITY (The Centre for Sensor Web Technologies at Dublin City University) team is involved in the integration of gas sensors into wearables for detection of hazardous gases like CO and CO2.
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by Noel E. O'Connor, Philip Kelly, Ciarán Ó'Conaire, Damien Connaghan, Alan F. Smeaton, Brian Caulfield, Dermot Diamond and Niall Moynahan
The evolution of the World-Wide Web to the Sensor Web is providing an unprecedented opportunity to develop novel applications in a variety of domains. In this article we describe our work on multi-modal sensing for sport.
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by Dónall McCann, Mark Roantree, Niall Moyna and Michael Whelan
In this article we will be discussing the synchronization of sensor data in team sports. Synchronization allows us to use more expressive queries, to query across all participants in a given activity and to potentially discover new knowledge from the semantically enriched data. A collaborative research effort between groups working on data management and on health and human performance (both at Dublin City University) involved a series of experiments using wearable sensors during team games and the capture and querying of sensed data.
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by John Barton, Brian Caulfield & Niall Moyna
The increasing availability of cheap, robust and deployable sensor technology will usher in a new wave of ubiquitous information sources. A particular implementation of ambient sensors is in the area of wearable electronics in body area networks incorporating inertial sensing devices. As part of the CLARITY Centre for Sensor Web Technologies, the Tyndall Wireless Inertial Measurement Unit (WIMU) is being used in a number of projects focussing on two key themes: Health and Fitness, and Helping the Aged.