Sensor-Cloud: Assimilation of Wireless Sensor Network and the Cloud

A broad ranges of vital applications that acquire and process information from the corporeal world are in the extensive need of Wireless sensor networks. Similarly distributed resource sharing is also in the need of Cloud computing which serves as a standards-based approach. Extension of the Cloud computing paradigm to the sharing of sensor resources in wireless sensor networks results in a much promising technology called Sensor Clouds. The amount of data generated from these vast set of sensor applications is huge. These data if combined with various web-based virtual communities can prove to be beneficial in several significant areas like a virtual community of doctors monitoring patient healthcare for virus infection, portal for sharing real-time traffic information, real-time environmental data monitoring and analyzing, etc. To permit this study, all types of sensor data will require for an increasing capability to do analysis and mining on-the-fly. Since the applications provided by Cloud computing is plenty; it may be combined with Sensor network in the application areas such as environmental monitoring, weather forecasting, transportation business, healthcare, military application etc. The idea that WSNs deployed for various applications are brought under one roof and then seeing it as a distinct virtual WSN unit through cloud computing infrastructure is novel. Sharing and analysis of real time sensor data on-the-fly becomes easier when cloud is integrated with WSNs. Added to it is the benefit of providing sensor data or sensor event as a service over the internet. In this paper, we have addressed numerous issues and challenges in the design of Sensor Clouds and we propose a framework called sensor-cloud to enable this exploration by integrating sensor networks to the talented cloud computing.