SensorPlanet website: www.sensorplanet.org

Overview

SensorPlanet is a Nokia-initiated cooperation on large-scale wireless sensor networks. The result of SensorPlanet is a global test platform for mobile-centric wireless sensor network research.

The objectives of SensorPlanet are to

• Make mobile handset -oriented wireless sensor network research easier
• Make possible for individual research groups to design and implement large scale experiments
• Allow creation and sharing of large data sets that can be analyzed/mined by many parties
• Establish a "Mobile Wireless Sensor Network Open Source community": Allow sharing of OS code
• Provide a forum for publishing early interesting results
• Accelerate concept innovation for consumer-oriented (and other) wireless sensor network research
• Create an ecosystem for industry and academia for collaboration and development

Implementations

During 2006, several demos are developed in SensorPlanet. The demos are based horizontal applications of which one exists at the moment: Nokia Remote Sensing platform (NORS). Another horizontal application, Virtual Graffiti, is being developed at NRC Toijala. The horizontal applications serve as platforms for more specific demos, the vertical applications.

Nokia Remote Sensing platform (NORS)

The Nokia Remote Sensing (NORS) platform is based on the Nokia Remote Sensing Architecture (N-RSA), an internally developed and fully specified architecture for mobile phone based remote sensing solutions. NORS allows for mobile phones to act as sensor sinks in local sensor networks. Sensor data is obtained locally through the mobile phones, which potentially aggregate this data and provide notifications for changed sensor data towards a back end application server upon subscription to the particular data. The back end server can implement a variety of application scenarios such as healthcare or environmental monitoring type of use cases.

Virtual Graffiti

Virtual Graffiti is a horizontal application currently under development in NRC Toijala. Users' movement is tracked and they can leave virtual "tags" in their environment. These tags can include pictures, music, video or text. Other users are can watch and comment on the tags.

Demos

Manhattan Story Mashup

Manhattan Story Mashup is a collaborative game involving both players in Manhattan and in the Web. MSM is a part of the Urban Games Festival, and the game is organized 23.9.2006. Anyone can take part in creating stories collaboratively in the Web, and the players in the field use their phones to take pictures to illustrate the stories. The stories are displayed on the Reuters displays on Times Square. More information about this demo can be found at www.storymashup.com

Research challenges

Some key challenges are:

• Volume: How to make the high-volume sensor data useful? How to manage the data? How to query/search the data?
• Adaptation: How to use the data for self-configuration and adaptation of devices?
• Integration: How to integrate (two-way) wireless sensory networks to Internet-based services?
• Power: How to manage the power consumption of the nodes and provide enough power for them?

Collaborations and partners

• CarTel project at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
• BIONETS - Biologically Inspired Networks