Toward ubiquitous Video-based Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) is a new generation of engineered systems that integrate physical systems with the capability of networked computing and control. Real-time video capture and communication is expected to be an important function in many cyber-physical systems that involve camera-equipped mobile phones. In this paper, we present AnySense, a network architecture that supports video communication between 3G phones and Internet hosts in cyber-physical systems. AnySense implements transcoding of video streams between the Internet and circuit-switched 3G cellular networks, and is transparent to 3G service providers. AnySense can support a class of ubiquitous cyber-physical systems that require video-based information collection and sharing. A prototype of AnySense has been built and a video demo is available at http://www.anyserver.org/.