Mobile centric wireless sensing
December 7th, 2010
| Started during my time at Nokia Research, wireless sensing is an important field of activity in my research, also connecting to the problem of large-scale publish-subscribe (see below). The NORS platform, being developed and eventually open-sourced during my time at Nokia Research, lays ground for a new form of participatory sensing that could potentially involve almost every end user directly through his/her mobile device being carried around. With that, end users directly become part of the provisioning system while still consuming the outcomes of the exercise as new forms of services, such as environmental warnings, traffic re-directs based on end user reports etc. The NORS work intended to combine best practises in sensor networking (using a simple yet efficient publish subscribe system) with modern smart phone technology, enabling the easy and fast integration of future sensors but also the fast developments of applications and services in the system. While the current implementation foresees a centralized application server on a Windows machine, future deployments can easily include servers directly on mobile phones of end users (the current practise of blocking phone-to-phone IP connections in mobile networks makes such deployment hardly likely and we therefore did not undergo the effort to port the server on a mobile platform). Future work in this space will not only focus on improvements to the platform, in particular in connection with the more general problem of large-scale publish subscribe (see below), but will also seek collaborations with academia to use the solution for their experiments on local sensing, federating the vast number of existing sensor deployments to a new form of experiments. The current open source availability of NORS makes such collaboration rather easy. |
