Sensor Andrew: Ubiquitous wide campus sensing exploitation

Summary form only given. Carnegie Mellon University has a long history of innovation in campus wide availability of networking infrastructures. In the early 80psilas, Andrew was inaugurated as a campus wide (wired) networking infrastructure that in a few years networked faculty, staff, and students (undergraduate and graduate) all across campus - offices, dormitories, room facilities. In 1995, Carnegie Mellon embarked on a similar effort with wireless Andrew that from 6 access points in 1995 went to hundreds and then thousands of access points in a couple of years providing global campus wireless coverage (see IEEE Personal Communications Magazine, February 1996). Both infrastructures served as campus wide testbeds to experiment and develop emergent technologies at the time. In 2006, Carnegie Mellon, through CenSCIR, the newly formed Center for Sensed Critical Infrastructure Research, has launched Sensor Andrew, a campus wide living laboratory to deploy thousands of sensing platforms of various types, providing campus wide instrumentation coverage, and supporting the breadth of applications users feel the need to develop. This keynote will overview Sensor Andrew, and describe its hardware, software, and middleware infrastructure, as well as some of the applications that are being developed. We will also address the issues related to what to do with the large amounts of data collected by an application supported on Sensor Andrew, how to process these data in a distributed fashion, and how to infer from the localized sensor information global understanding and global behaviors.