MetroSense Project: People-Centric Sensing at Scale

Looking forward 10-20 years we envision Internet scale sensing where the majority of the traffic on the network is sensor data and the majority of applications used every day by the general populace integrates sensing and actuation in some form. Sensing will be people-centric. On the other hand, nearly all published sensor network research over the last five years has focused on isola ted, small scale testbeds designed for specialized applications (e.g., environmental sensing, industrial sensing, etc.) of interest t o engineers and scientists. We believe the gap between the state of the art and our future vision can be bridged through the development of a new wireless sensor edge for the Internet. To this end, in the MetroSense Project we are developing a general purpose sensing infrastructure capable of realizing a wealth of sensing applications with mass appeal for producers and consumers of sensed data. In this paper we motivate the need for a new architecture to support people-centric sensing at Internet scale, outline our MetroSense architecture [1], and highlight our progress to date in designing and deploying prototype implementations of the MetroSense architecture via the deployment of our campus area sensor network.