SNS: Architecture for Sensor Network-based Services via Internet Service Provider

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are envisioned to be widely deployed for monitoring the various phenomena such as environmental factors, seismic activity, weather conditions etc. In order to provide ease of access of sensor network based services to the end users, commercialization of these services has been proposed through sensor web portals which imitate the sensor network access similar to web server access via web page. However, this proposal lacks in sensor portal discovery mechanism, its subscription, security and management. It is due to this deficiency that the sensor network based services are not accessible to the general public despite extensive deployment of these networks. This paper presents a novel architecture; Sensor Network based Services (SNS) which makes use of the widely available and popular Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for hosting, publicizing and securing the sensor web portals. In SNS, we propose a coupling between the web page and the ISP which provides the advantages of a one-window-operation, security and privacy, query content and locality and sensor data cache management. We analyze the various business models for advertising the costs, query and data traffic and mathematically model them in order to evaluate them for SNS. Our analysis validates the effectiveness of SNS in terms of considerable saving in query processing time for a large number of data types and end users.