An approach for developing networked sensors architectures

Current sensor technologies provide an abundance of sensed data in a variety of bands and formats. However, rather than providing the intended improvements in situational awareness for military and civil infrastructures, these sensor systems tend to deluge users with huge data sets that hide the data of interest within the shear volume of detailed output. Additionally, these sensor systems are generally independent, forcing human operators to locate, integrate and correlate the data across multiple systems. Emerging concepts in sensor technologies suggest that a networked, collaborative approach to sensing may provide superior performance in situational awareness. This approach shows the promise of improving collected data accessibility to human users, as well as automating correlation and corroboration of collected data across multiple bands and sensor modalities. This paper explores basic networked sensor concepts and presents notional architectures for constructing and operating networks of sensors.