Wireless Sensor Networks as a Service

One major reason for the increasing interest in wireless sensor networks (WSN) in the last few years is their potential usage in a wide range of application domains. However, there is a set of challenges to be addressed in order to realize the true potential of current WSNs. The first challenge concerns the effort needed to develop WSN application since the developers are required to know several sensor network and protocol specific details. The second main challenge is related to the fact that the most of existent WSNs provide data in proprietary formats that can be accessed by final user only through a set of static predefined queries or a graphical interface, hindering the widespread use of WSN data in different applications. The third challenge concerns the semantic gap between the representation of the high-level application requirements and the low-level data provided by sensor nodes. We argue that, by adopting a SOA approach based on integrating WSN to the concept of web mashups we will be able to leverage the widespread use of WSNs.