Assessing the challenges of environmental signal processing through the sensorscope project

SensorScope is a collaborative project between network, signal processing, and environmental researchers that aims at providing a cheap and out-of-the-box environmental monitoring system based on a wireless sensor network. It has been successfully used in a number of deployments to gather hundreds of megabytes of environmental data. With data gathering techniques well mastered, the efficient processing of the huge amounts of the acquired information to allow for useful exploitation has become an increasingly important issue. In this paper, we present a number of challenging and relevant signal processing tasks that arise from the SensorScope project. We believe the resolution of these problems will benefit from a better understanding of the underlying physical processes. We show an example to demonstrate how physical correlations between different sensing modalities can help reduce the sampling rate.