Environment Monitoring in Smart Cities Using Virtual Sensors

In this paper, we propose a sensor-cloud environment which incorporates remotely located physical sensor devices in the generic resource family along with other resources like CPU, memory, etc. An architecture of the sensor-cloud environment is discussed in this paper that spans multiple infrastructures hosting local and remote resources. Such a sensor-cloud architecture can be used for environment monitoring applications in smart cities. Deployment of virtual sensors in the proposed architecture enables shared and on-demand use of physical sensors by different applications and facilitates the SaaS developers to focus more on the business logic instead of worrying about the intricacies of using heterogeneous sensing devices. Some usage scenarios for environment monitoring and a preliminary implementation are also discussed in this paper.