A sensor cloud test-bed for multi-model and multi-user sensor applications

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are popular for their usage in various application like environmental monitoring because of their small size and ease of deployment. However, there is a considerable cost of owning and maintaining involved which might impede small to medium scale industries from availing their services. Even for large-scale industries, WSNs deployed and maintained with so much financial investment, when remains under utilized affects their profitability. This challenge with WSNs needs to be addressed in such a manner that small and medium scale industries could use a hassle free on-demand provisioned and de-provisioned service by paying usage fee only. On the other hand, this should result in a better utilization of the installed capacity of WSNs, pruning down their under-utilization to the barest minimum. In order to address this challenge such that everybody benefits by using the services offered by WSNs and as well as building new services, we have proposed Sensor Cloud infrastructure. The proposed Sensor Cloud infrastructure is a cloud of heterogeneous WSNs, where owners of WSNs collaborate to offer sensing-as-a-service. In this paper, we discuss the implementation of our proposed Sensor Cloud infrastructure by building middleware, client centric-layer which creates virtual sensors on top of physical WSNs, and present the results of its usage and operation.