A Web services environment for Internet-scale sensor computing

We present a Web-services framework for publishing, browsing, and analyzing real-time sensor data. Existing work, based on database technologies, assumes a known set of sensors, deployed for a specific application, intended for a group of users who are aware of the application. In contrast, our work provides a new environment for publishing real-time sensor data, and sharing sensor-based applications with unsolicited users over the Internet. Providers register their sensors with a UDDI registry where any user can discover them over the Internet. Once the desired sensors are located, the user can employ two new communication protocols, namely SSCP and SSTP, to control the incoming sensor streams. As the data arrive at the user browser software, a corresponding plug-in such as a data animation module is activated to allow the user to "see" the data stream presented in an intelligible way.