Dissemination of Real-time Sensor Data on the Internet

In this paper, we present a WISE (Web-based Intelligent Sensor Explorer) framework for disseminating real-time sensor data on the Internet. Existing work focuses mainly on designing techniques for application-specific sensor networks. Such designs assume a known set of sensors, deployed for a specific application, intended for a group of users who are aware of the application. In contrast, WISE enriches the WWW by providing a new environment for publishing real-time sensor data, and sharing sensor-based applications with unsolicited users over the Internet. It enables providers to advertise their sensors using a Sensor Data Description Advertisement File. To find relevant sensors, any user can search the Internet using a highly scalable peer-to-peer search mechanism. Once the desired sensors are located, the user can employ two new communication protocols, namely SSCP and SSTP, to remotely control the incoming sensor streams. As the data arrive at the user browser software, a data animation module allows the user to “see” the data stream presented in an intelligible way. A prototype is also presented in this paper. We describe the implementation details, and discuss experiments that show WISE indeed provides an effective framework for publishing, finding, and using sensors over the Internet.