G-Sense: a scalable architecture for global sensing and monitoring

The pervasiveness of cellular phones combined with Internet connectivity, GPS embedded chips, location information, and integrated sensors provide an excellent platform to collect data about the individual and its surrounding environment. As a result, new applications have recently appeared to address large-scale societal problems as well as improve the quality of life of the individual. However, these new applications, recently called location-based services, participatory sensing, and human-centric sensing, bring many new challenges, one of them being the management of the huge amount of traffic (data) they generate. This article presents G-Sense, for Global-Sense, an architecture that integrates mobile and static wireless sensor networks in support of location-based services, participatory sensing, and human-centric sensing applications. G-Sense includes specific mechanisms to control the amount of data generated by these applications while meeting the application requirements. Furthermore, it creates a network of servers organized in a peer-to-peer architecture to address scalability and reliability issues. An example prototype application is presented along with some basic results and open research issues.