Sensors as a Service Oriented Architecture: Middleware for Sensor Networks

There is a significant challenge in designing, optimizing, deploying and managing complex sensor networks over heterogeneous communications infrastructures. The ITA Sensor Fabric addresses these challenges in the areas of sensor identification and discovery, sensor access and control, and sensor data consumability, by extending the message bus model commonly found in commercial IT infrastructures out to the edge of the network. In this paper we take the message bus model further into a semantically rich, model-based design and analysis approach that considers the sensor network and its contained services as a Service Oriented Architecture. We present an application of a hierarchic schema for nested service definitions together with an initial ontology that describes the assets and services deployed in a sensor network infrastructure.