Ecosystems monitoring is essential to properly understand their development and the effects of events, both climatological and anthropological in nature. The amount of data used in these assessments is increasing at very high rates. This is due to increasing availability of sensing systems and the development of new techniques to analyze sensor data. The Enviro-Net Project encompasses several of such sensor system deployments across five countries in the Americas. These deployments use a few different ground-based sensor systems, installed at different heights monitoring the conditions in tropical dry forests over long periods of time. This paper presents our experience in deploying and maintaining these systems, retrieving and pre-processing the data, and describes the Web portal developed to help with data management, visualization and analysis.
Although it is common to think about sensor data management as stream data management, with the associated challenges (on-line aggregation, classification, ) @cite_32 , at least within environmental research, particularly in ground-based monitoring, this is not a frequent scenario. Most of the current applications based on sensor data use the perspective of historical (or an archive of) time series data. Applications using the stream data perspective are only beginning to appear, and the current applications that do require that perspective---e.g., volcano monitoring @cite_21 ---are still the exception. Data manipulation for most of the current applications is done after having the data collected and stored, applying a variety of analytical operations in an offline fashion @cite_3 @cite_27 .
@cite_27 @cite_21 @cite_32 @cite_3
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Many real-world wireless sensor network applications such as environmental monitoring, structural health monitoring, and smart grid can be formulated as a least-squares problem. In distributed Cyber-Physical System (CPS), each sensor node observes partial phenomena due to spatial and temporal restriction and is able to form only partial rows of least-squares. Traditionally, these partial measurements were gathered at a centralized location. However, with the increase in sensors and their measurements, aggregation is becoming challenging and infeasible. In this paper, we propose distributed randomized kaczmarz that performs in-network computation to solve least-squares over the network by avoiding costly communication. As a case study, we present a volcano monitoring application on a distributed CORE emulator and use real data from Mt. St. Helens to evaluate our proposed method. As the number of sensors that pervade our lives increases (e.g., environmental sensors, phone sensors, etc.), the efficient management of massive amount of sensor data is becoming increasingly important. The infinite nature of sensor data poses a serious challenge for query processing even in a cloud infrastructure. Traditional raw sensor data management systems based on relational databases lack scalability to accommodate large-scale sensor data efficiently. Thus, distributed key-value stores in the cloud are becoming a prime tool to manage sensor data. Model-view sensor data management, which stores the sensor data in the form of modeled segments, brings the additional advantages of data compression and value interpolation. However, currently there are no techniques for indexing and or query optimization of the model-view sensor data in the cloud; full table scan is needed for query processing in the worst case. In this paper, we propose an innovative index for modeled segments in key-value stores, namely KVI-index. KVI-index consists of two interval indices on the time and sensor value dimensions respectively, each of which has an in-memory search tree and a secondary list materialized in the key-value store. Then, we introduce a KVI-index-Scan-MapReduce hybrid approach to perform efficient query processing upon modeled data streams. As proved by a series of experiments at a private cloud infrastructure, our approach outperforms in query-response time and index-updating efficiency both Hadoop-based parallel processing of the raw sensor data and multiple alternative indexing approaches of model-view data. We present a science-centric evaluation of a 19-day sensor network deployment at Reventador, an active volcano in Ecuador. Each of the 16 sensors continuously sampled seismic and acoustic data at 100 Hz. Nodes used an event-detection algorithm to trigger on interesting volcanic activity and initiate reliable data transfer to the base station. During the deployment, the network recorded 229 earthquakes, eruptions, and other seismoacoustic events. The science requirements of reliable data collection, accurate event detection, and high timing precision drive sensor networks in new directions for geophysical monitoring. The main contribution of this paper is an evaluation of the sensor network as a scientific instrument, holding it to the standards of existing instrumentation in terms of data fidelity (the quality and accuracy of the recorded signals) and yield (the quantity of the captured data). We describe an approach to time rectification of the acquired signals that can recover accurate timing despite failures of the underlying time synchronization protocol. In addition, we perform a detailed study of the sensor network's data using a direct comparison to a standalone data logger, as well as an investigation of seismic and acoustic wave arrival times across the network. The increasing use of sensor technology for various monitoring applications (e.g. air-pollution, traffic, climate-change, etc.) has led to an unprecedented volume of streaming data that has to be efficiently aggregated, stored and retrieved. Real-time model-based data approximation and filtering is a common solution for reducing the storage (and communication) overhead. However, the selection of the most efficient model depends on the characteristics of the data stream, namely rate, burstiness, data range, etc., which cannot be always known a priori for (mobile) sensors and they can even dynamically change. In this paper, we investigate the innovative concept of efficiently combining multiple approximation models in real-time. Our approach dynamically adapts to the properties of the data stream and approximates each data segment with the most suitable model. As experimentally proved, our multi-model approximation approach always produces fewer or equal data segments than those of the best individual model, and thus provably achieves higher data compression ratio than individual linear models. In the recent past, search in sensor systems focused on node hardware constraints and very limited energy resources. But nowadays, that new applications need data processing with temporal constraints in their tasks; then one of the new challenges faced by wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is handling real-time storage and querying the data they process. Two main approaches to storage and querying data are generally considered warehousing and distributed. The warehousing approach stores data in a central database and then queries may be performed to it. In a distributed approach, sensor devices are considered as local databases and data are managed locally. The data collected by sensors must represent the current state of the environment; for this reason they are subject to logic and time constraints. Then, this paper identifies the main specifications of real-time data management and presents the available real-time data management solutions for WSNs, in order to discuss them and identify some open issues and provide guidelines for further contributions. Current techniques for cyclone detection and tracking employ NCEP (National Centers for Environmental Prediction) models from in-situ measurements. This solution does not provide true global coverage, unlike remote satellite observations. However it is impractical to use a single Earth orbiting satellite to detect and track events such as cyclones in a continuous manner due to limited spatial and temporal coverage. One solution to alleviate such persistent problems is to utilize heterogeneous sensor data from multiple orbiting satellites. However, this solution requires overcoming other new challenges such as varying spatial and temporal resolution between satellite sensor data, the need to establish correspondence between features from different satellite sensors, and the lack of definitive indicators for cyclone events in some sensor data. We describe an automated cyclone discovery and tracking approach using heterogeneous near real-time sensor data from multiple satellites. This approach addresses the unique challenges associated with knowledge discovery and mining from heterogeneous satellite data streams. We consider two remote sensor measurements in our current implementation, namely: QuikSCAT wind satellite measurements, and merged precipitation data from TRMM and other satellites. More satellites will be incorporated in the near future and our solution is sufficiently powerful that it generalizes to multiple sensor measurement modalities. Our approach consists of three main components: (i) feature extraction from each sensor measurement, (ii) an ensemble classifier for cyclone discovery, and (iii) knowledge sharing between the different remote sensor measurements based on a linear Kalman filter for predictive cyclone tracking. Experimental results on historical hurricane datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared to previous work. Wireless sensor networks offer the potential to span and monitor large geographical areas inexpensively. Sensors, however, have significant power constraint (battery life), making communication very expensive. Another important issue in the context of sensor-based information systems is that individual sensor readings are inherently unreliable. In order to address these two aspects, sensor database systems like TinyDB and Cougar enable in-network data aggregation to reduce the communication cost and improve reliability. The existing data aggregation techniques, however, are limited to relatively simple types of queries such as SUM, COUNT, AVG, and MIN MAX. In this paper we propose a data aggregation scheme that significantly extends the class of queries that can be answered using sensor networks. These queries include (approximate) quantiles, such as the median, the most frequent data values, such as the consensus value, a histogram of the data distribution, as well as range queries. In our scheme, each sensor aggregates the data it has received from other sensors into a fixed (user specified) size message. We provide strict theoretical guarantees on the approximation quality of the queries in terms of the message size. We evaluate the performance of our aggregation scheme by simulation and demonstrate its accuracy, scalability and low resource utilization for highly variable input data sets. Recent technological advances enable realization of wireless sensor networks suitable for many applications including environmental monitoring, biological and chemical contamination detection, earthquake management. Depending on the application, the properties of sensor network databases include a distributed environment, approximate and long-running queries, large volumes of data, uncertainty and fuzziness in data and in queries, activeness, etc., which bring out new database processing and management problems. In particular, reactive sensor network database applications must be able to detect the occurrences of specific events or changes in the network state, and to respond by automatically executing the appropriate application logic. For such applications, an ECA rule-based fuzzy active database approach fits well. In this study, we propose an active database approach employing a fuzzy Petri net model, which processes uncertain sensor data and handles flexible (i.e., fuzzy and approximate) and continuous queries. The proposed model provides a natural data processing and management approach for sensor and actuator network applications that require reactive behavior. In passive monitoring using sensor networks, low energy supplies drastically constrain sensors in terms of calculation and communication abilities. Designing processing algorithms at the sensor level that take into account these constraints is an important problem in this context. Here we study the estimation of correlation functions between sensors using compressed acquisition and one-bit-quantization. The estimation is achieved directly using compressed samples, without considering any reconstruction of the signals. We show that if the signals of interest are far from white noise, estimation of the correlation using @math compressed samples out of @math can be more advantageous than estimation of the correlation using @math consecutive samples. The analysis consists of studying the asymptotic performance of the estimators at a fixed compression rate. We provide the analysis when the compression is realized by a random projection matrix composed of independent and identically distributed entries. The framework includes widely used random projection matrices, such as Gaussian and Bernoulli matrices, and it also includes very sparse matrices. However, it does not include subsampling without replacement, for which a separate analysis is provided. When considering one-bit-quantization as well, the theoretical analysis is not tractable. However, empirical evidence allows the conclusion that in practical situations, compressed and quantized estimators behave sufficiently correctly to be useful in, for example, time-delay estimation and model estimation. This brief introduces a class of problems and models for the prediction of the scalar field of interest from noisy observations collected by mobile sensor networks. It also introduces the problem of optimal coordination of robotic sensors to maximize the prediction quality subject to communication and mobility constraints either in a centralized or distributed manner. To solve such problems, fully Bayesian approaches are adopted, allowing various sources of uncertainties to be integrated into an inferential framework effectively capturing all aspects of variability involved. The fully Bayesian approach also allows the most appropriate values for additional model parameters to be selected automatically by data, and the optimal inference and prediction for the underlying scalar field to be achieved. In particular, spatio-temporal Gaussian process regression is formulated for robotic sensors to fuse multifactorial effects of observations, measurement noise, and prior distributions for obtaining the predictive distribution of a scalar environmental field of interest. New techniques are introduced to avoid computationally prohibitive Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for resource-constrained mobile sensors. Bayesian Prediction and Adaptive Sampling Algorithms for Mobile Sensor Networks starts with a simple spatio-temporal model and increases the level of model flexibility and uncertainty step by step, simultaneously solving increasingly complicated problems and coping with increasing complexity, until it ends with fully Bayesian approaches that take into account a broad spectrum of uncertainties in observations, model parameters, and constraints in mobile sensor networks. The book is timely, being very useful for many researchers in control, robotics, computer science and statistics trying to tackle a variety of tasks such as environmental monitoring and adaptive sampling, surveillance, exploration, and plume tracking which are of increasing currency. Problems are solved creatively by seamless combination of theories and concepts from Bayesian statistics, mobile sensor networks, optimal experiment design, and distributed computation. Sensors generate large amounts of spatiotemporal data that have to be stored and analyzed. However, spatiotemporal data still lack the equivalent of a DBMS that would allow their declarative analysis. We argue that the reason for this is that DBMSs have been built with the assumption that the stored data are the ground truth. This is not the case with sensor measurements, which are merely incomplete and inaccurate samples of the ground truth. Based on this observation, we present Plato; an extensible DBMS for spatiotemporal sensor data that leverages signal processing algorithms to infer from the measurements the underlying ground truth in the form of statistical models. These models are then used to answer queries over the data. By operating on the model instead of the raw data, Plato achieves significant data compression and corresponding query processing speedup. Moreover, by employing models that separate the signal from the noise, Plato produces query results of higher quality than even the original measurements. Detecting and classifying targets in video streams from surveillance cameras is a cumbersome, error-prone and expensive task. Often, the incurred costs are prohibitive for real-time monitoring. This leads to data being stored locally or transmitted to a central storage site for post-incident examination. The required communication links and archiving of the video data are still expensive and this setup excludes preemptive actions to respond to imminent threats. An effective way to overcome these limitations is to build a smart camera that analyzes the data on-site, close to the sensor, and transmits alerts when relevant video sequences are detected. Deep neural networks (DNNs) have come to outperform humans in visual classifications tasks and are also performing exceptionally well on other computer vision tasks. The concept of DNNs and Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) can easily be extended to make use of higher-dimensional input data such as multispectral data. We explore this opportunity in terms of achievable accuracy and required computational effort. To analyze the precision of DNNs for scene labeling in an urban surveillance scenario we have created a dataset with 8 classes obtained in a field experiment. We combine an RGB camera with a 25-channel VIS-NIR snapshot sensor to assess the potential of multispectral image data for target classification. We evaluate several new DNNs, showing that the spectral information fused together with the RGB frames can be used to improve the accuracy of the system or to achieve similar accuracy with a 3x smaller computation effort. We achieve a very high per-pixel accuracy of 99.1 . Even for scarcely occurring, but particularly interesting classes, such as cars, 75 of the pixels are labeled correctly with errors occurring only around the border of the objects. This high accuracy was obtained with a training set of only 30 labeled images, paving the way for fast adaptation to various application scenarios. In this paper we develop a framework for a sequential decision making under budget constraints for multi-class classification. In many classification systems, such as medical diagnosis and homeland security, sequential decisions are often warranted. For each instance, a sensor is first chosen for acquiring measurements and then based on the available information one decides (rejects) to seek more measurements from a new sensor modality or to terminate by classifying the example based on the available information. Different sensors have varying costs for acquisition, and these costs account for delay, throughput or monetary value. Consequently, we seek methods for maximizing performance of the system subject to budget constraints. We formulate a multi-stage multi-class empirical risk objective and learn sequential decision functions from training data. We show that reject decision at each stage can be posed as supervised binary classification. We derive bounds for the VC dimension of the multi-stage system to quantify the generalization error. We compare our approach to alternative strategies on several multi-class real world datasets. In the past few years there has been increased interest in using data-mining techniques to extract interesting patterns from time series data generated by sensors monitoring temporally varying phenomenon. Most work has assumed that raw data is somehow processed to generate a sequence of events, which is then mined for interesting episodes. In some cases the rule for determining when a sensor reading should generate an event is well known. However, if the phenomenon is ill-understood, stating such a rule is difficult. Detection of events in such an environment is the focus of this paper. Consider a dynamic phenomenon whose behavior changes enough over time to be considered a qualitatively significant change. The problem we investigate is of identifying the time points at which the behavior change occurs. In the statistics literature this has been called the change-point detection problem. The standard approach has been to (a) upriori determine the number of change-points that are to be discovered, and (b) decide the function that will be used for curve fitting in the interval between successive change-points. In this paper we generalize along both these dimensions. We propose an iterative algorithm that fits a model to a time segment, and uses a likelihood criterion to determine if the segment should be partitioned further, i.e. if it contains a new changepoint. In this paper we present algorithms for both the batch and incremental versions of the problem, and evaluate their behavior with synthetic and real data. Finally, we present initial results comparing the change-points detected by the batch algorithm with those detected by people using visual inspection. It may not be feasible for sensor networks monitoring nature and inaccessible geographical regions to include powered sinks with Internet connections. We consider the scenario where sinks are not present in large-scale sensor networks, and unreliable sensors have to collectively resort to storing sensed data over time on themselves. At a time of convenience, such cached data from a small subset of live sensors may be collected by a centralized (possibly mobile) collector. In this paper, we propose a decentralized algorithm using fountain codes to guarantee the persistence and reliability of cached data on unreliable sensors. With fountain codes, the collector is able to recover all data as long as a sufficient number of sensors are alive. We use random walks to disseminate data from a sensor to a random subset of sensors in the network. Our algorithms take advantage of the low decoding complexity of fountain codes, as well as the scalability of the dissemination process via random walks. We have proposed two algorithms based on random walks. Our theoretical analysis and simulation-based studies have shown that, the first algorithm maintains the same level of fault tolerance as the original centralized fountain code, while introducing lower overhead than naive random-walk based implementation in the dissemination process. Our second algorithm has lower level of fault tolerance than the original centralized fountain code, but consumes much lower dissemination cost. As we are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of sensors deployed around the world is growing at a rapid pace. Market research has shown a significant growth of sensor deployments over the past decade and has predicted a significant increment of the growth rate in the future. These sensors continuously generate enormous amounts of data. However, in order to add value to raw sensor data we need to understand it. Collection, modelling, reasoning, and distribution of context in relation to sensor data plays critical role in this challenge. Context-aware computing has proven to be successful in understanding sensor data. In this paper, we survey context awareness from an IoT perspective. We present the necessary background by introducing the IoT paradigm and context-aware fundamentals at the beginning. Then we provide an in-depth analysis of context life cycle. We evaluate a subset of projects (50) which represent the majority of research and commercial solutions proposed in the field of context-aware computing conducted over the last decade (2001-2011) based on our own taxonomy. Finally, based on our evaluation, we highlight the lessons to be learnt from the past and some possible directions for future research. The survey addresses a broad range of techniques, methods, models, functionalities, systems, applications, and middleware solutions related to context awareness and IoT. Our goal is not only to analyse, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate their findings and discuss their applicability towards the IoT. While sensor networks are going to be deployed in diverse application specific contexts, one unifying view is to treat them essentially as distributed databases. The simplest mechanism to obtain information from this kind of a database is to flood queries for named data within the network and obtain the relevant responses from sources. However, if the queries are (a) complex, (b) one-shot, and (c) for replicated data, this simple approach can be highly inefficient. In the context of energy-starved sensor networks, alternative strategies need to be examined for such queries. We propose a novel and efficient mechanism for obtaining information in sensor networks which we refer to as ACtive QUery forwarding In sensoR nEtworks (ACQUIRE). The basic principle behind ACQUIRE is to consider the query as an active entity that is forwarded through the network (either randomly or in some directed manner) in search of the solution. ACQUIRE also incorporates a look-ahead parameter d in the following manner: intermediate nodes that handle the active query use information from all nodes within d hops in order to partially resolve the query. When the active query is fully resolved, a completed response is sent directly back to the querying node. We take a mathematical modelling approach in this paper to calculate the energy costs associated with ACQUIRE. The models permit us to characterize analytically the impact of critical parameters, and compare the performance of ACQUIRE with respect to other schemes such as flooding-based querying (FBQ) and expanding ring search (ERS), in terms of energy usage, response latency and storage requirements. We show that with optimal parameter settings, depending on the update frequency, ACQUIRE obtains order of magnitude reduction over FBQ and potentially over 60–75 reduction over ERS (in highly dynamic environments and high query rates) in consumed energy. We show that these energy savings are provided in trade for increased response latency. The mathematical analysis is validated through extensive simulations. � 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Limited energy supply is one of the major constraints in wireless sensor networks. A feasible strategy is to aggressively reduce the spatial sampling rate of sensors, that is, the density of the measure points in a field. By properly scheduling, we want to retain the high fidelity of data collection. In this paper, we propose a data collection method that is based on a careful analysis of the surveillance data reported by the sensors. By exploring the spatial correlation of sensing data, we dynamically partition the sensor nodes into clusters so that the sensors in the same cluster have similar surveillance time series. They can share the workload of data collection in the future since their future readings may likely be similar. Furthermore, during a short-time period, a sensor may report similar readings. Such a correlation in the data reported from the same sensor is called temporal correlation, which can be explored to further save energy. We develop a generic framework to address several important technical challenges, including how to partition the sensors into clusters, how to dynamically maintain the clusters in response to environmental changes, how to schedule the sensors in a cluster, how to explore temporal correlation, and how to restore the data in the sink with high fidelity. We conduct an extensive empirical study to test our method using both a real test bed system and a large-scale synthetic data set. Declarative queries are proving to be an attractive paradigm for ineracting with networks of wireless sensors. The metaphor that "the sensornet is a database" is problematic, however, because sensors do not exhaustively represent the data in the real world. In order to map the raw sensor readings onto physical reality, a model of that reality is required to complement the readings. In this paper, we enrich interactive sensor querying with statistical modeling techniques. We demonstrate that such models can help provide answers that are both more meaningful, and, by introducing approximations with probabilistic confidences, significantly more efficient to compute in both time and energy. Utilizing the combination of a model and live data acquisition raises the challenging optimization problem of selecting the best sensor readings to acquire, balancing the increase in the confidence of our answer against the communication and data acquisition costs in the network. We describe an exponential time algorithm for finding the optimal solution to this optimization problem, and a polynomial-time heuristic for identifying solutions that perform well in practice. We evaluate our approach on several real-world sensor-network data sets, taking into account the real measured data and communication quality, demonstrating that our model-based approach provides a high-fidelity representation of the real phenomena and leads to significant performance gains versus traditional data acquisition techniques. In the context of the Internet of Things, an increasing number of platforms like Xively or ThingSpeak are available to manage ubiquitous sensor data. Strict data formats allow interoperability and informative visualizations, supporting the development of custom user applications. Yet, these strict data formats as well as the common device-centric approach limit the flexibility of these platforms: there are no means to incorporate people and their subjective impressions about the collected data. In order to build the Internet of Things and People and ultimately the Internet of Everything, we aim at providing an extendable concept of data which allows to enrich existing data points with any kind of additional information. This enables us to gain semantic and user specific context by attaching subjective data to objective values. For this end we support data ranging from text-based formats like JSON to images and video footage. This paper provides an overview of our architecture including concept, implementation details and present applications. We distinguish our approach from several other systems and describe two sensing applications namely AirProbe and WideNoise that were implemented for our platform.