Scenarios, Research Issues, and Architecture for Ubiquitous Sensing

This paper describes research issues and work-in-progress concerning ubiquitous sensing. We present scenarios where the current approaches are deficient in addressing the needs for ubiquitous sensing in services and applications on the Future Internet, involving the massive sharing of information from sensors via heterogeneous networks. We propose an information-centric architecture for real-time ubiquitous sensing which capitalizes on the proposed locator/identifier split, thus extending the Network of Information (NetInf) approach. From this we identify the challenges for which we present work-in-progress within the framework of the EU-funded MediaSense project. Firstly, we integrate sensors as addressable objects, exposed by means of sensor gateways and relocatable abstract interfaces. Sensor information is thus made available to applications solely based on identity. Secondly, sensor information is made available in a distributed data model towards searching and browsing. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of the architecture in proof-of-concept applications for intelligent commuting, environmental monitoring and seamless media transfer, utilizing two different sensor platforms.