Virtual Sensors

Virtual Sensors Model

Abstract

Sensor networks are increasingly used to provide pervasive environments. These deployment environments entail embedded sensing devices that have limited processing, memory, and battery power. It is therefore essential to devise efficient approaches that can collect low-level sensed data and transform it to a higher, more abstract measurement to relay to the user. This paper introduces the virtual sensors abstraction that enables an application developer to create software sensors that can apply user-specified functions on different types of data to provide a higher-level measurement that is not an intrinsic measurement provided by the physical sensors in the network. We evaluate our implementation of the virtual sensors model in two diverse example domains.

Publications

S. Kabadayi, A. Pridgen, and C. Julien, “Virtual Sensors: Abstracting Data from Physical Sensors,” Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Mobile Distributed Computing, in Conjunction with the 2006 International Symposium on World of Wireless, Mobile, and Multimedia Networks, June, pp. 587-592.
S. Kabadayi, C. Julien, and J. Trujillo, "Virtual sensors: heterogeneous aggregation in pervasive networks ," Technical Report, TR-UTEDGE-2006-009, Center for Excellence in Distributed Global Environments, The University of Texas at Austin, 2006.

Download

The code we used for the virtual sensors applications is available here. This is a zipped version of the entire source tree. Some very brief notes about using this code are available here.

Credits

The virtual sensors model is the product of a research collaboration between Sanem Kabadayi, Christine Julien, and Jason Trujillo.