Irisnet: An architecture for compute-intensive wide-area sensor network services

TitleIrisnet: An architecture for compute-intensive wide-area sensor network services
Publication TypeJournal Articles
Year of Publication2002
AuthorsNath S, Deshpande A, Ke Y, Gibbons P, Karp B, Seshan S
JournalIntel Corporation, Pittsburgh IRPTR-02
Volume10
Date Published2002///
Abstract

Previous work on sensor networks has targeted adhoc wireless networks of closely-colocated, resource-
constrained scalar sensor motes. Such work has over-
looked richer sensor types such as webcams and mi-
crophones, which are typically attached to Internet-
connected machines with significant computing power
and storage. In this paper, we describe IrisNet (Internet-
scale Resource-Intensive Sensor Network services), an
architecture for wide-area sensor networks based on
these more capable sensing nodes. IrisNet provides a
common, scalable software infrastructure that enables
the flexible creation of sensor-based Internet services.
It dramatically reduces network bandwidth utilization
through the use of senselets, binary code fragments that
perform intensive data filtering at the sensing nodes,
leveraging the available processing power and mem-
ory. IrisNet employs a two-tier hierarchy of sensing
nodes and query processing nodes. Key features of
IrisNet include flexible data partitioning, efficient and
protected sharing of sensor nodes, low-latency queries,
partial match caching, query-specified freshness toler-
ances, and monitoring and logging support. This pa-
per reports on experiments with a working IrisNet pro-
totype running a parking space finder service, demon-
strating the effectiveness of IrisNet’s features in achiev-
ing scalability and reducing query response times.