Sensor node plug-in system: A service-oriented middleware forwireless sensor networks

Sensors populate our environment in a pervasive way. You may find them at home, in your car, in streets, or even in your smartphone. They are usually employed to measure various kind of phenomena, and can serve very specific purposes such as monitoring, surveillance, prediction, controlling. In the IoT vision, the potential represented by the huge amount of raw data that millions of sensors produce every day need to be transformed into a more exploitable knowledge. In order to keep up with the pace at which raw data are being produced today, we need new solutions that combine tools for data management and services capable of promptly structuring, aggregating and mining data even at the time they are produced. This chapter discusses some of the issues related to the management of sensors and sensor data, and proposes a solution to face these issues. The proposed solution is a middleware to be deployed on top of physical sensors, capable of abstracting away sensors’ proprietary interfaces, and offering them to third party applications in an as-a-Service fashion for an immediate and universal use. The viability of the approach was finally tested on real-life use case scenarios.