Sensor grid

A Sensor Grid integrates wireless sensor networks with grid infrastructures to enable real-time sensor data collection and the sharing of computational and storage resources for sensor data processing and management. It is an enabling technology for building large-scale infrastructures, integrating heterogeneous sensor, data and computational resources deployed over a wide area, to undertake complicated surveillance tasks such as environmental monitoring.

The Sensor Grid enables the collection, processing, sharing, and visualization, archival and searching of large amounts of sensor data. There are several rationales for a SensorGrid. First, the vast amount of data collected by the sensors can be processed, analyzed, and stored using the computational and data storage resources of the grid. Second, the sensors can be efficiently shared by different users and applications under flexible usage scenarios. Each user can access a subset of the sensors during a particular time period to run a specific application, and to collect the desired type of sensor data. Third, as sensor devices with embedded processors become more computationally powerful, it is more efficient to offload specialized tasks such as image and signal on the sensor devices. Finally, a sensor grid provides seamless access to a wide variety of resources in a pervasive manner. Advanced techniques in artificial intelligence, data fusion, data mining, and distributed database processing can be applied to make sense of the sensor data and generate new knowledge of the environment. The results can in turn be used to optimize the operation of the sensors, or influence the operation of actuators to change the environment. Thus, sensor grids are well suited for adaptive and pervasive computing applications.

Figure 1 shows a typical Sensor Grid design architecture.

A Sensor Grid based architecture has many applications such as environmental and habitat monitoring, healthcare monitoring of patients, weather monitoring and forecasting, military and homeland security surveillance, tracking of goods and manufacturing processes, safety monitoring of physical structures and construction sites, smart homes and offices, and many other uses that we do not yet imagine.

For Sensor Grid architectures, designs and applications, see the following:

[1] H.B. Lim, et.al. Sensor Grid: Integration of Wireless Sensor Networks and the Grid, In Proc. of the IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks 30th Anniversary (LCN’05), October 2005.

[2] Hingne, V.; Joshi, A.; Houstis, E.; Michopoulos, J. On the Grid and Sensor Networks. In Proc. Of International Workshop on Grid Computing. pages 166-173. Nov. 2003

[3] Crisisgrid (2007): http://www.crisisgrid.org

[4] M. Gaynor, et al. Integrating wireless sensor networks with the grid. IEEE Internet Computing, pages 32–39, Jul/Aug 2004.

[5] H. B. Lim, K. V. Ling, W. Wang, Y. Yao, M. Iqbal, B. Li, X. Yin, and T. Sharma, "The National Weather Sensor Grid," Proc. of the 5th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2007), Nov 2007.

[6] The National Weather Sensor Grid: http://nwsp.ntu.edu.sg